What to do when a parcel goes missing

Tracking says delivered at 11:42. Your buyer says nothing arrived, and now you're staring at a £26 order wondering whether they're lying and whether it matters.

Legally, in the UK, it's yours. Under section 29 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 goods stay at the trader's risk until they come into the consumer's physical possession, so a parcel that never reached your buyer is your problem to fix, not theirs to chase. There's one narrow exception: if the buyer arranged their own courier, one you didn't offer, risk passed when you handed it over. That's rare for a small seller, and it isn't what happened here. (Checked August 2026; if you're reading this much later, verify it still says that.)

So you sort the buyer out on your timetable, and you chase the courier separately. Those are two different processes and running them as one is what turns a £26 problem into a two-week argument.

The first thirty minutes, before you argue with anyone

Do these in order. Most "lost" parcels are found in this list.

1. Read the tracking event properly. Not the word "Delivered", the detail underneath. Left in a safe place? Handed to a neighbour? Is there a GPS pin or a photo? A photo of a green front door when your buyer has a red one is the whole answer in one glance.
2. Check what you actually shipped to. Open the order and read the address you printed, character by character, against the address the buyer gave. A transposed house number is the single most common cause and it's yours, not the courier's.
3. Check the postcode against the street. Buyers get their own postcodes wrong more often than you'd believe, usually one digit, usually onto a real street a mile away.
4. Check whether it moved at all. A parcel that scanned "accepted" and never scanned again didn't go missing in transit. It fell out of the network at the first hop, and that's a different claim.

If the tracking shows a safe-place delivery or a neighbour, you have something concrete to give the buyer. If it shows a bare "delivered" with no detail and no photo, you have nothing, and you should stop investigating and start deciding.

The message to send while you still look reasonable

Send this before the buyer has to chase you twice. Speed is most of the goodwill you'll get out of this.

Hi Ruth, sorry about this. The tracking says it was delivered at 11:42 on Tuesday and left in a safe place, but that clearly isn't good enough if you haven't got it. Could you check with anyone else at the address and have a quick look behind the bins and the porch? I'll open a case with the courier today either way. If it hasn't turned up by Friday I'll send you a replacement, no arguing about it.

Four things in one message. It shows you looked. It asks the buyer to do the one check that solves maybe a fifth of these. It commits you to an action with a date. And it removes the thing the buyer is most worried about, which is that they're going to have to fight you.

Never make the buyer wait on the courier's process. The courier's timeline is your problem, not theirs.

When a parcel officially counts as lost

You can't claim the day it goes quiet. Every carrier has a waiting period, and then a separate deadline for filing. Royal Mail's retail terms, read in August 2026, look like this:

	Wait before it counts as lost	Deadline to claim
1st and 2nd Class	10 working days after the due delivery date	80 calendar days from posting
Special Delivery Guaranteed	5 working days after the due delivery date	80 calendar days from posting

They say they'll come back with an outcome within 30 calendar days, and longer if they can't. Other carriers set their own windows and they're usually shorter than Royal Mail's, sometimes 14 or 21 days from posting, which catches sellers out constantly. Find your carrier's claim deadline today and write it on a note, because you will need it on a Sunday night at some point.

Those two columns are why the buyer's clock and the courier's clock have to be separate. Ten working days is a fortnight. No buyer waits a fortnight in silence, and none should be asked to.

What a claim needs, and why most of them fail

Claims fail on evidence, not on merit. The four things nearly every carrier asks for:

• Proof of posting. A Certificate of Posting from the counter, or the drop-off receipt, or the scan confirmation. Without this, most claims die immediately. It costs nothing and half of sellers don't get one.
• Proof of value. Not your retail price. What the item cost you, evidenced. Carriers pay compensation against cost or against a capped amount, and an invoice or a materials receipt is what they'll accept.
• Both addresses in full, sender and recipient.
• The tracking reference and the service you paid for.

Two traps worth knowing. Compensation is usually capped by the service you bought, not by what the item was worth, so a £180 order sent on a service that caps at £20 gets you £20. And compensation often covers the item and the postage, but not your time, not your packaging, and not the replacement you already sent.

That cap is the real decision. For a £14 order, the cheapest service is right and you should treat any loss as a cost of doing business. For a £180 order, paying the extra for a service that actually covers the value is not insurance, it's arithmetic.

Replace, refund, or wait

You have four options and they aren't equally good.

What you do	Costs you	Right when
Replace immediately	One more unit and one more label	The item is back in stock and your margin can take it
Refund immediately	The whole order value	You're out of stock, or the buyer's gone cold
Partial refund, buyer keeps waiting	Some goodwill, some money	Almost never. It reads as haggling
Wait for the carrier	Nothing yet, plenty later	Never, if the buyer is waiting on it

Replace beats refund when you can, and not for sentimental reasons. A replacement costs you the unit cost plus a label. A refund costs you the full sale price. On a £26 tote with £9 of cost, replacing costs £9 plus postage and keeps the customer. Refunding costs £26 and ends the relationship. The exception is when they needed it for a specific date that's now passed, in which case refund fast and don't make them explain.

Under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, if you agreed no delivery time, the default is 30 days, and a buyer can set a new reasonable deadline and cancel for a refund if you miss it. If they cancel within the 14-day cooling-off period you owe the refund, including the basic delivery cost, within 14 days of being told. Those are floors, not targets. Waiting 29 days is legal and it will get you a review you'll remember.

The buyer who is lying

Some of them are. Not many, and you will never know which.

The only workable policy is a rule you apply to everyone rather than a judgement you make each time. Something like: first claim gets replaced, no questions. Second claim from the same address gets a signature-required service and a conversation. That covers the honest overwhelming majority immediately and quietly closes the door on the small number working through your shop.

Keep a note of the address, not the person, because names change and addresses don't. If you've had three "not received" claims and two of them came from the same street, you've found your problem and it might be a courier driver rather than a buyer.

What you should not do is interrogate someone over a £26 item. The time costs more than the tote, the review costs more than both, and you'll be wrong about a third of the time.

Worked example: Ruth, screen-printed totes, Bristol

Ruth prints tote bags in a shared studio in Bristol, sells them at £26, and posts about 70 a month on a tracked 48 service. Materials and printing come to £9.10 a bag. Postage and packaging is £3.40.

In one quarter she had four "not received" claims out of 210 parcels, which is 1.9%. Her handling was: message the buyer, wait for the carrier, then refund if the claim failed. It took eleven days on average, two of them left one-star reviews, and she refunded all four at £26 for a total of £104.

She changed three things.

1. Proof of posting on every parcel, which the counter gives free and which she'd been skipping when the queue was long.
2. A stated rule, on the shop page: "If your order hasn't arrived within 10 days of dispatch, message me and I'll resend it. No forms."
3. Signature-required on anything over £60, which is about one order in nine.

Next quarter: three claims out of 232. She resent all three within 24 hours at £12.50 each, so £37.50 instead of £104. Two of the three ordered again. Royal Mail paid out on one of the underlying claims, six weeks later, which she'd genuinely forgotten about by then.

The number that surprised her wasn't the money. It was that the average time from complaint to resolution went from eleven days to one, and that nobody who got a same-day resend left a review at all.

Stop it happening again

Most missing parcels aren't mysteries. They're a handful of preventable things:

• Get proof of posting every single time. It's free and it's the difference between a claim and a story.
• Photograph the packed parcel with the label visible before it leaves. Thirty parcels a day makes this annoying; one disputed claim makes it worth it.
• Print labels from the address the buyer typed, don't retype it. Retyping is where the transposed digits come from.
• Ask for a phone number and put it on the label. Couriers use it, and a parcel with a number on it gets a call instead of a shrug.
• Put a business return address on the outside. An undeliverable parcel with no return address is destroyed. With one, it comes back and you've lost postage instead of stock.
• Match the service to the value. Cheapest for small, tracked and signed for anything you'd be upset to lose.

Packaging matters here too, because a parcel that bursts in the network becomes a parcel that goes missing. That's covered in packaging that survives the courier.

What Sailo does here, and what it doesn't

Every order has fields for the carrier, the tracking number and a tracking URL, plus a shipped date and a status you move through new, confirmed, shipped, completed, cancelled and refunded. There's a refund amount and a reason on the order, and a flag for whether the stock went back on the shelf, which is exactly what you want when you're reconciling a messy month.

The honest limitation: those are places to write things down, not a courier integration. Sailo never fetches a tracking status, never notices a parcel has stalled, never emails the buyer that it's late and cannot file a claim for you. Recording a refund on the order records a refund on the order. On bank transfer or cash on delivery, moving the actual money back to the buyer is something you do in your banking app, because Sailo never held it in the first place.

That's a real gap if you're shipping hundreds of parcels a week and you want exception reports. At 70 parcels a month it's a non-issue, and the discipline of writing the tracking number down on the day you ship is worth more than any integration.

Do this on the next parcel you send

Get proof of posting, photograph the parcel with the label showing, and write the tracking number onto the order the same day. Then find your carrier's claim deadline, the actual number of days, and put it somewhere you'll see it.

Then write your rule down in one sentence and put it on your shop page, because the reason these go badly is almost never the missing parcel. It's that neither of you knew what was supposed to happen next. If you're not sure what to promise in the first place, delivery times you can actually promise sets the window, and how to work out delivery charges tells you what the tracked service is really costing you. When the parcel does come back rather than vanish, handling returns without a warehouse picks up from there.