Filing a lost or damaged package claim

This page is about parcels with no delivery scan — the ones that went quiet in transit, or arrived broken. If tracking shows the parcel was delivered and your buyer says it never turned up, that is a different problem with a different set of remedies, and it lives on tracking says delivered, buyer says not received, which also owns the question of who ultimately pays.

Everything here follows from one structural fact: two clocks are running and they are not connected. The buyer's clock is a marketplace or a payment dispute, and it is short. The carrier's clock is an investigation, and it is long — and it does not even start until the parcel has been missing long enough for the carrier to agree that it is missing. Sellers who wait for the second clock before answering the first lose the buyer, the metric, and often the money as well. Refund or reship first. Recover second. The recovery is a separate transaction that either lands or does not.

Filing windows and required evidence, carrier by carrier

Before any window matters, the parcel has to qualify. A late parcel is not a lost parcel, and every carrier has a threshold — expressed as elapsed transit without a scan — below which a claim is closed rather than queued. Filing early is worse than filing late, because it burns the record. The sequence that works is the same everywhere: confirm the scans have genuinely stopped, raise a trace or search if that carrier requires one first, then file against the tracking number with proof of value attached.

Carrier policy reference — compiled 2026-08-04. Filing windows, waiting periods, and default coverage caps are deliberately not printed here. They differ by service and by domestic versus international movement, and each carrier revises them on its own schedule. The governing documents are the USPS Domestic Mail Manual (indemnity and claims) together with the International Mail Manual for outbound international; the UPS Tariff / Terms and Conditions of Service for your origin country; the FedEx Service Guide in force on your ship date; and the DHL Express Terms and Conditions of Carriage. Read the one that covers your shipment before you rely on a number. Review cadence: annual, by the named marketing owner recorded with this page.

What default declared-value coverage actually covers — and leaves exposed

The most expensive misunderstanding in small-parcel shipping is treating default declared value as insurance. It is not a policy; it is a liability limit. It caps what the carrier will pay if a claim succeeds, and it does nothing at all if the claim fails. That distinction decides real money in three places.

First, it pays your cost, not your price. Carriers indemnify the value of the goods, evidenced by what you paid for them or what they cost you to make — not the retail figure the buyer was charged, and not the shipping you have already spent. Second, it is capped per shipment, so a consolidated parcel holding several orders concentrates several sales behind one limit. Third, it excludes categories. Fragile items, items with no verifiable cost basis, and shipments the carrier judges to have been inadequately packed are exactly the shipments where claims are refused, and inadequate packaging is the single most common denial reason on damage claims. That is why the damage row in the table above says keep the box: a damage claim without the packaging is an assertion, not evidence.

A returned parcel is a different failure with a different bill — why a package comes back, and who pays to reship covers it — and a label bought in error that never moved at all is not a claim but a void with the credit back in your wallet.

When paying for insurance beats self-insuring

Self-insuring is a legitimate strategy and most small sellers are doing it without saying so. The question is only whether it is the cheaper one for a given parcel, and that is arithmetic you can actually do. Take the amount you would absorb if this shipment vanished — cost of goods plus the label plus the replacement's label, since a lost order usually costs you two shipments, not one. Subtract whatever default declared value would return if a claim succeeded. Multiply what is left by how often parcels like this one actually go missing in your own history. Compare that number to the premium. Below the default cap, buying coverage is paying twice for the same exposure. Above it, or on anything fragile, one-of-a-kind, or expensive to remake, the premium is almost always smaller than the loss spread across a month.

The reason this decision has to be made at label time is that it is the only moment it is cheap. Afterwards it is not a decision at all. On GoatLabels insurance is a per-shipment option chosen at quote, with the premium priced into the same all-in number as the carrier rate and paid from the same prepaid balance — so a high-value parcel and an ordinary one can be handled differently without maintaining two workflows. To be exact about what that is and is not: GoatLabels sells the option and shows you the price. It does not underwrite the coverage and it does not adjudicate the claim. Whether a claim is paid is the carrier's decision, made on the carrier's evidence standard, and no shipping platform can promise you otherwise. What a platform can do is make sure the evidence exists — the label, the declared figures, the quote, and the timeline all attached to the same shipment record — and keep the per-label price honest while you are absorbing the loss.