Tracking says delivered, buyer says not received

This page is about parcels with a delivery scan. If tracking went quiet and never produced one, the parcel is in transit or missing, and the remedies are completely different — filing a lost or damaged package claim covers that case. Here, the carrier believes it finished the job, and everything that follows is about what that belief costs you.

What a delivery scan does to your claim options

A delivery scan is the carrier's own record that the service was performed, produced by its own device at its own timestamp. It is not conclusive in any legal sense, but in practice it is the strongest evidence in the room and every process downstream treats it that way. The result is that a lost-package claim on a scanned-delivered parcel is very hard to win, and at USPS in particular the scan is treated as delivery, which is why sellers who push that route usually spend two weeks to arrive where they started.

What is worth saying just as plainly is the opposite of the usual advice on this topic: the scan does not close everything. It closes the specific argument that the parcel never arrived. It says nothing about the condition of what arrived, and it says nothing about whether it arrived at the right address — and both of those are ordinary, filed, routinely investigated claims. Reaching for the wrong one is the actual error, not filing at all.

The exceptions that survive a delivered scan: damage, and documented misdelivery

Damage is unaffected by a delivery scan, because damage claims presuppose delivery. What they depend on instead is promptness and physical evidence: the article, the packaging as it arrived, and photographs taken before anything is repacked or thrown out. A damage claim without the box is an assertion, and inadequate packaging is the most common denial reason there is.

Misdelivery is the harder and more valuable exception. It requires turning a suspicion into a record, which means asking the carrier for what it captured at the scan — the delivery point description in the tracking detail, and where the carrier retains it, the geolocation of the device at the moment of the scan. If that data puts the parcel somewhere other than the destination on the label, you are no longer arguing about whether it was delivered; you are reporting that it was delivered to the wrong place, which UPS and FedEx will investigate against the address and the delivery record. Ask early. This data is retained for a limited window and the answer stops being available long before the dispute stops mattering.

Who pays: seller protection, marketplace by marketplace

This is the question underneath every other question on this page, and the honest answer is that it depends far less on shipping law than on where the sale happened. There are two regimes, and knowing which one you are in tells you almost everything.

If the sale ran through a marketplace's own checkout — eBay, Etsy, TikTok Shop, Mercari, Poshmark and their peers — the platform adjudicates the item-not-received case under its own seller-protection policy, and those policies are built out of conditions rather than judgement. The recurring ones are: the transaction went through the platform's checkout rather than around it, valid tracking was attached to the order before the platform's own deadline, the tracking shows a delivery scan, and the delivery address matches the address on the order. Some platforms add a value threshold above which signature confirmation is required for protection to apply. Every one of those is a thing you either did at ship time or did not, which is why protection is usually lost in the first ten minutes of fulfilment rather than in the dispute. Shipping to an address a buyer sent you in a message, or uploading tracking a day late, is how sellers disqualify themselves.

If the sale ran through your own storefront — Shopify, WooCommerce, a link in a DM — no such policy exists. There is no platform to appeal to, and the buyer's remedy is a card chargeback, decided under the card network's rules rather than a marketplace's. Your evidence is the same evidence, but the audience is a bank, and the practical defence is proof that the goods went to the cardholder's address. That is one of the strongest arguments for shipping to the address on the order and nowhere else, and for keeping the buyer informed while the parcel is moving: a branded tracking page and tracking emails give the buyer somewhere to look before they reach for their bank.

Neither regime is a carrier claim, and neither is affected by one. If the parcel never arrived because it went back instead, a returned parcel is a different problem with a different bill.

Policy reference — compiled 2026-08-04. No deadline, value threshold, or protection condition is quoted with a figure on this page, because marketplace seller-protection terms change more often than any other input on this site and are versioned per platform and per region. The governing documents are each marketplace's own seller-protection and money-back-guarantee policies, and for own-storefront sales, the card networks' published chargeback rules. Carrier-side routes are governed by the USPS Domestic Mail Manual, the UPS Tariff / Terms and Conditions of Service, the FedEx Service Guide, and the DHL Express Terms and Conditions of Carriage. Review cadence: every six months, by the named marketing owner recorded with this page.

When signature confirmation costs less than the loss

Once you have lost one of these, the temptation is to require a signature on everything. That is usually the wrong response, because you would be adding a fee and a delivery inconvenience to every buyer to defend against a small fraction of them. The calculation is the same one that governs insurance: the fee is worth paying when it is smaller than what you would absorb multiplied by how often you actually absorb it. Three situations pass that test reliably — orders above the value where a single loss outweighs a season of fees, addresses that have already produced one disputed delivery, and delivery environments where parcels are left in shared lobbies or on street-facing steps.

Two things make that a per-order decision rather than an account-wide switch. Signature type and mode are set per shipment on GoatLabels, so a high-exposure order can carry one while the rest of the day's queue does not. And the carrier's signature fee is priced into the same all-in quote as the rate itself, so you are comparing two complete prices instead of discovering an accessorial afterwards — the wider family of those add-ons is covered on shipping surcharges explained. The result is that protecting the orders worth protecting does not raise the price of the ones that are not, which is the same reason rate-shopping every parcel beats picking one carrier and one service level for everything.