No ticket category creates more mutual suspicion than this one. The tracking says delivered, the customer says nothing arrived, and both sides quietly suspect the other of lying. The good news: the legal side is clearer than most merchants think. The bad news: it’s clear in the customer’s favor.
Who carries the risk? (You do.)
When you sell to consumers, you bear the transit risk until the goods are actually in the customer’s hands. That’s EU-wide consumer law, and it doesn’t care what your shipping terms say. Until real handover, non-delivery is your problem — your claim is against the carrier, not against the customer.
The part most merchants get wrong: a “delivered” tracking status is not legal proof of delivery. If the customer disputes receiving the parcel, it’s on you to prove actual handover — a signature, a photo the carrier can attribute, a named recipient. A tracking pixel that says “delivered 14:32” or a note that it was “handed to a neighbor” doesn’t meet that bar on its own.
Two real exceptions:
- A drop-off permission (Abstellgenehmigung) granted by the customer — if the customer told the carrier “leave it by the garage,” the risk of it vanishing from the garage is theirs.
- B2B buyers — commercial customers typically carry transit risk once the goods reach the carrier.
What this means in practice
For consumer orders where you can’t prove handover, the endgame is almost always reship or refund — the only question is how gracefully and how fast you get there. Fighting a consumer over a €40 parcel you legally owe them costs you the case and the customer and, if they pay by PayPal or card, usually ends in a dispute you also lose (how those work).
So build the process for speed and dignity instead:
1. First reply: remove the suspicion
The customer writing “my parcel says delivered but it’s not here” is braced for being treated as a fraud suspect. The first reply decides the tone of everything after: acknowledge, say you’re on it, and give a concrete next step with a date. Never open with “are you sure you checked everywhere?“
2. Pull the real tracking detail
Not the status — the detail. Last scan location and time, GPS coordinates or photo evidence if the carrier records them, named recipient if any. This either resolves the case (“it’s at your pickup shop under your neighbor’s name”) or becomes your carrier-claim evidence.
3. Ask the courtesy questions — as courtesy
Neighbors, household members, safe places, the parcel shop around the corner: worth one friendly ask, because it genuinely resolves a share of cases within hours. But frame it as helping, not as a condition for taking the case seriously — legally it isn’t one.
4. Start the carrier investigation — without making the customer wait
File the investigation (DHL, DPD and co. typically take two to four weeks) and claim against the carrier’s liability in parallel. But don’t park the customer behind that timeline: they bought a product, not a logistics process. Industry practice that works: a short, fixed customer-side deadline — “if it hasn’t surfaced by Friday, we ship a replacement or refund you, your choice.”
5. Decide by rule, not by mood
Write the decision rule down: below €X, reship immediately without waiting; above €X, wait for the investigation window, then reship/refund. Track “not received” claims per customer — a first claim gets full benefit of the doubt; a third one in two months gets signature-required shipping on future orders. That’s how you handle the small fraud segment without insulting the honest majority.
Prevention is cheaper than resolution
- Signature or PIN on high-value parcels — the €2 option beats the €200 write-off.
- Proactive tracking communication — a customer who watched the parcel move rarely files “not received” out of impatience, and stuck parcels get caught before the “delivered” surprise (the WISMO playbook covers the mechanism).
- Offer pickup points and honest delivery windows at checkout — parcels that wait safely don’t walk away from porches.
The cost logic
A lost-parcel case handled by hand touches the carrier portal, the shop backend, the shipping tool and the inbox across multiple days — it’s one of the most expensive standard tickets there is (what a ticket really costs). Yet almost every step above is mechanical: pull tracking detail, check the claim history, apply the value threshold, trigger the replacement order or refund, file the carrier claim. That’s exactly the category of casework a resolution system executes end-to-end — with the genuinely suspicious cases escalated to you, evidence attached. The live demo shows it on a real case from your store.
This article is a practical overview for merchants, not legal advice. Details vary by country and carrier contract — have your shipping terms reviewed by a lawyer.