Delivered on Tracking, Empty at the Door: The Claim Evidence Chain

A tracking page that says delivered and a customer who says nothing arrived are both true statements about different things. One records a scan at a location; the other records an empty doorstep. The gap between them is closed by evidence, and the evidence has a deadline attached to it. Sellers who lose these claims usually lose them on timing, not on the merits.

Key facts

• Two clocks run, and the shorter one matters first. Carrier-published guidance on loss and damage claims sets a notification window measured in weeks from delivery or from the expected delivery date, with a much longer outer limit for filing; the windows are carrier terms, not marketplace terms.
• The claim is opened by the shipper, not the buyer. On a parcel bought under a seller's own account, the contracting party with the carrier is the one who files. A buyer-initiated dispute starts a separate marketplace clock that does not pause the carrier one.
• Proof of delivery is a location, a time and a name. A scan marked delivered without a coordinate, timestamp or receiver reference is weak evidence in a dispute about a stolen or mis-delivered parcel.
• Compensation follows the value declared at booking. The declared value on the shipment record sets the ceiling; a later customer refund does not move it.

What the delivery scan actually asserts

A final scan records that a parcel was presented and released at an address. It does not record who took it, whether the address was the one the customer supplied, or whether the unit inside matched the order. Each of those is a separate question, and each has a different evidence source: the carrier publishes a coordinate and a photograph on some services and nothing but a code on others; the address history sits with the store; the contents sit with the warehouse that packed the box. The first move in a non-delivery dispute is therefore not a claim, it is the assembly of four records that describe the same event from four positions.

Read that way, a delivered-not-received report is a routing question with three possible answers — wrong address, wrong unit, or theft after delivery — and the carrier claim only covers one of them.

The four records a fulfilment warehouse can produce

Order record, packing record, weight and dimension record, and label record. That is the honest list, and it is worth stating what is not on it. We cannot produce a photograph of a doorstep we did not stand at, a signature we did not collect, or a delivery GPS point we do not receive. Where a service returns proof-of-delivery data, it arrives on the carrier's tracking feed and is passed through in the claim pack rather than reconstructed afterwards.

Why the notification window is the whole game

Carrier claim terms are written around notice, and the notice period is short relative to the filing period. A seller who waits for a refund decision, a marketplace case number, or a season-end reconciliation before touching the carrier form can arrive at the counter with an arguable case and no standing. The practical rule is that a non-delivery report from a customer starts the evidence pack on the same day, and the carrier notification is filed before any marketplace decision is expected back. Second, the clock starts from an event defined in carrier terms — typically the delivery scan or the estimated delivery date, whichever the applicable condition sets — not from the moment the buyer emails. Sellers who assume their fulfilment partner filed something by default usually find out at the deadline.

What we do and what stays with you

On a lane booked under your account, the claim belongs to you and our role is to feed it: the four records above, retrieved against the order number, are the standard pack we produce. On a lane booked under ours as the shipper on a delivered-duty-paid service, we are the party with standing and we open it, which is why our terms page separates liability by lane rather than promising a blanket service. What never changes is the ceiling: recovery follows the value declared at booking, and declared value is a field you set when the parcel is created.

Three disputes that look identical and are not

Tracking says delivered but my customer received nothing. Who starts the claim?

Whoever is named as shipper on the transport contract with the carrier, because that is the party with standing. On a parcel that left our floor under your own carrier account, you file and we supply the records. On a delivered-duty-paid lane where we are the shipper, we file, and we will ask you for the customer's statement and any photo of the delivery point before the notice window closes. The one arrangement that reliably loses money is both parties assuming the other filed. If you are not certain which side of that line an order sits on, the shipping confirmation and the account reference on the label settle it, and that is a two-minute check rather than a week of correspondence.

Will a refund from me to the customer be recovered from the carrier?

Not automatically, and often not at all, because the two numbers are set by different documents. What you chose to refund is a commercial decision about a customer relationship. What a carrier will pay is bounded by the value declared when the shipment was created, by the terms of the service actually purchased, and in many parcel classes by a flat liability amount unless extra cover was bought at booking. A seller who refunds generously and declares conservatively has paid the difference themselves. The fix is upstream of the dispute: declared value set to the real transaction value at the time the parcel is created, and that choice visible in your own order data when a claim is opened months later.

Can you prove what was inside the carton?

We can prove what was scanned into it. Every unit passes a pick scan against its stock-keeping unit and the carton is closed against that line, so the record binds an item to a box at a timestamp on our floor. What we cannot do is attest to condition at the door or to contents after a seal is broken, and a claim pack that overstates this invites the carrier to discount the rest. Where a category genuinely needs stronger evidence than a scan — high-value serialised goods, sealed tamper-evident packaging, or a two-person check at closure — that is arranged as a named task before the order is picked and priced as part of the flow rather than assembled after a loss.

Windows and liability structure summarised from carrier-published claim guidance and from our own terms, read at 2026-10-30; carrier terms are revised periodically and the version applicable to a shipment is the one in force when that parcel is booked. Transit estimates on this site are typical ranges, not delivery promises.

Published under SBT FulfillDock by Shenzhen Shibotong International Logistics Co., Ltd.

Related: our liability terms, the full question list, and carrier claim guidance from a parcel carrier's filing page.