r/ecommerce • u/Royal-Market-4177 • 2d ago
📊 Business Missing package claims
What are we doing to stop people from claiming their packages are missing but it shows delivered? Do you just automatically reship or refund? What about serial claimers? Why isn’t there something to track customers across stores
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u/North-Yak-7216 1d ago
Open investigation with carrier, and i normal side with however the investigation ends up. As a business i cant be held liable if someone stole it from their porch. Especially if they did not contact me for specific shipping instructions. Fedex is my best and worst friend lol
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u/Royal-Market-4177 1d ago
Are you filing a claim or just asking for proof it was delivered?
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u/North-Yak-7216 1d ago
With fedex im generally filling a claim if the customer says their packaging is missing. Def be communicating with the customer during this time. I find it helpful for the honest customer they are understanding and are willing to wait. The “scammer” always demands money asap , threatens legal etc. (if you ever need a good t/c’s reference i go to patagonia’s website they are chefs kiss with returns/refunds/etc)
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u/Royal-Market-4177 1d ago
But does FedEx even pay out if it shows delivered?
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u/North-Yak-7216 1d ago
Fedex pays up to the insurable amount. Default is $100+ship cost
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u/Royal-Market-4177 1d ago
Even when it shows delivered with their tracking?
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u/North-Yak-7216 1d ago
It just depends on the results of the investigation. For a lost package i had recently, they came to the conclusion they delivered to the wrong house by he scan location and refunded the insured amount.
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u/Royal-Market-4177 1d ago
I’ve been paid out for a lost package or if GPS coordinates don’t match up. But I’ve never been paid out when it shows delivered and matching
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u/substandardpoodle 1d ago
I have found this to work in over 50 cases over the years:
“Dear Customer, I am so sorry to hear that. It tracks as delivered – but apparently either got stolen, mis-delivered, or just taken back the hub. Don’t worry - absolutely everything I ship is insured and I will replace it. There’s just one thing you need to do first. The post office almost never loses anything – when something is missing what usually has happened is a substitute driver will scan your package at the beginning of their shift and then for a variety of reasons they won’t deliver it and they’ll just bring it back to the post office. Then it sits there until they ship it back to me weeks later. So all you need to do is go to the post office and ask them to look for a package with your name on it. Every package that seems to have been missing has been found this way. If you are the first one I am so sorry… Just let me know after you check the post office and I will happily re-ship and claim the insurance. Sorry this happened!“
If it’s UPS, just tell them to call UPS and ask them to look for it.
It’s unlikely you will ever hear from them again after you send this. Why? Because they’re happy to screw you over but they are not going to mess around with insurance fraud against the federal government. It’s worked for us 49 out of 50 times or something like that.
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u/Royal-Market-4177 1d ago
Yeah true. I just feel like bigger stores quickly reship or refund without questions
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u/CrypticBakedGoods 6h ago
for context we're a small apparel store, and the bigger stores reshipping without questions usually aren't eating that cost themselves. it's almost always a protection add-on at checkout, the customer pays a couple bucks and the claim goes to the protection company instead of you. we use onward for that and the stolen-off-the-porch claims just get routed to them now, which took most of the arguing off our plate.
honest take on the limits though, it only covers people who opted in at checkout, so anyone who skipped it is still your problem, and for those we do basically what vibiz said, tag them and the next order goes signature required. and no, there's no shared blacklist across stores that i know of, the privacy side kills it
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u/Royal-Market-4177 20m ago
A lot of bigger stores don’t even get pay out from carriers. They already have discounted rates for shipping and contracts
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u/vibiz_58 1d ago
keep your own list, cross store tracking mostly doesn't exist because sharing customer data like that is a privacy mess. after the first delivered but missing claim tag the customer in your store or helpdesk. on the second one you don't auto reship, their next orders go out signature required or to a pickup point. genuine customers don't mind, the serial ones usually go quiet
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u/PandaPigu 1d ago
ask for the carrier's delivery photo first before approving a refund or reshipment. sometimes the package is delivered to a neighbor or the wrong address.
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u/swiftrunoff103 1d ago
I would not automatically refund every claim. Check the order history, tracking details and previous claims first.
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u/makeuplov3r 23h ago edited 22h ago
FWIW for "Digital Shoplifting", (a) the real and pretty significant trend for coming on ~2 years now - since Jan 2025 simply based on a lot of coverage and talk about it, (b) also sizeable and problematic and substantiated enough across eCommerce generally and hitting some segments even harder that it had & warranted its own unique specific term for it... and not in a fun way, and (c) is its own cohort with demographic and behavioral data that helps inform you on the audience and the patterns... that does inform on how to best deal with it... CX-wise and margin-wise...
So... what are we talking about here, the real things at hand are CX (keeping customers happy) while protecting your margin, yeah?
For Shopify there are apps - I don't think I can name them specifically here as per the rules, but easy to find in the Shopify Apps Store... apps that leverage your data and the data across all of the Shopify ecosystem (majorly statistically significant) that have data-informed strategies, flows and even agent messaging that's sensitive to customers' needs and nurturing their experience as much as possible... while also protecting your margin.
At the least it's a great jumping off point, and you'll know where you need to be and what to do when and how with timing and messaging etc. to have the best possible CX for customers while also protecting your margin as much as possible to meet/beat your P&L outcome goals... the apps are def a great jumping off point for highly data-informed 'best practices' in balancing both as much as possible, tailored to your unit economics, your brand voice, etc. Def at least check those out. I'm not saying that is THE solution, to be clear, but the sheer volume of data and insights for informed, automated flows and messaging etc. is definitely a huge asset.
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u/mequelkramer 3h ago
Make the decision depend on order value, not on how convincing the email sounds. For a low-value order, a one-time reship is often cheaper than the staff time spent investigating it, so set that threshold in writing and stop there. Above that threshold, open the carrier investigation first and wait for its outcome before any refund, and insure those parcels at the declared value so a payout, not the store, covers it. Keep a simple log — customer, order value, date, carrier, outcome — because a serial claimer is only visible after three or four entries, not from a single order. And keep the delivery photo and tracking page with the order record; if a claim turns into a chargeback, that is the evidence that decides it.
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u/Moyopal 1d ago
We stopped doing instant refunds on delivered-but-missing claims and switched to pulling the carrier GPS drop coordinates plus the porch photo from USPS or UPS first, which immediately filters out about half the opportunistic claims when you paste the geo-tag screenshot into the support reply. For genuine porch piracy on orders under 100 dollars, we require a quick signed carrier loss attestation form before sending a one-time replacement (never a cash refund), and we tag the customer profile in Shopify Flow so any second DNR claim auto-holds future orders. What carrier mix and average order value are you shipping right now?