The money your carrier owes you and nobody claims

When a parcel goes missing or arrives broken, you replace the product, refund the money and the case is closed. What the carrier owes you for that incident usually goes unclaimed, and it's never through carelessness.

Your carrier owes you money and you don't know it

A parcel goes missing, customer service handles it and then either a new product is sent out to the customer or the money is refunded. The ticket is closed.

The problem isn't there, it's what comes after. There's almost never anyone checking whether that shipment can be claimed, gathering the information the carrier asks for, filing the claim in time and following it up until the money comes back.

And it isn't because anyone is doing their job badly. It's that every carrier has its own deadlines and requirements, and in many cases spending time on this kind of claim doesn't pay off, either because of the number of parcels lost or because of what each one is worth. Which leaves the brand asking itself: is it worth putting effort into recovering these parcels?

Eleven carriers, eleven different processes

And here's the real problem. It isn't that claiming is hard, it's that you have to learn how to do it eleven times over.

With some you claim by email and you have seven days. With others you log into their portal and you have sixty. With another it's a different portal again, and the window is eighty days domestically and a hundred and eighty abroad. Another gives you fourteen. Another, twenty-one for damages.

Some pay into your bank account and others deduct it from your next invoice. Some have a bulk claims form and others want you to email one specific person.

So there's no such thing as a claims process. There are eleven, each with its own deadline, channel, paperwork and way of paying out.

That's what turns a simple task into one nobody does.

When you add up every shipment, the figure changes

At one of the brands we work with, going through their history showed that the value of claims they'd never filed came to more than £309,000.

These weren't borderline cases or shipments that couldn't be claimed. They were incidents that were entirely claimable and simply went unhandled, because nobody gave them the attention they needed.

And they hadn't come up before for a very simple reason: that money wasn't recorded as a loss anywhere.

When a product goes missing, the brand usually replaces it and that cost ends up filed as part of handling the order. But there's no line anywhere saying "money the carrier owes us, or that we haven't claimed yet".

So that money doesn't tend to appear in any report. Nobody reviews it and, as a result, nobody asks whether it's there.

In the end it gets mixed in with other costs, and it never even becomes visible that there was something to claim.

Why nobody claims

There's a problem with deadlines, and it's that carriers don't all work the same way. Some give you seven days from the expected delivery date, others twenty-one, and others start counting from the last tracking update. Once that window closes, the claim can't be filed.

Then there's all the paperwork you have to put together. It might take an invoice, a delivery note, photos of the packaging, proof of the value of the goods or even confirmation that the product was sent out to the customer again. And the documents they ask for aren't always the same. A loss isn't handled the same way as a product that arrived damaged.

And there are cases where the incident never even gets spotted. A parcel can go nine days without an update and still not show as lost in any system. There's simply no news, the status doesn't change. And by the time the customer writes in asking what happened, the window to claim may already have closed.

That last one is the hardest to recover, because it isn't that the claim was filed badly. It's that it never existed at all.

Why Claims does the claiming for you

There's an AI agent behind Claims, and it's worth explaining how it works.

The first thing it does is analyse the tracking status of every shipment and cross-reference it against each carrier's deadlines, which are already loaded into the system, so nobody has to remember whether one carrier gave you seven days and another sixty.

When a parcel goes longer without a status update than that carrier allows, an alert goes up for review. And it also goes up for the ones that are technically still moving but haven't had any news for days, which are the ones that normally slip through because nobody knows they can be claimed too.

From there it works out how much you're owed under your agreement with that carrier, drafts the claim the way they want it and gathers the paperwork. If they come back asking for something else, it answers with what it has, and if it doesn't have it, it flags a person.

The one thing it doesn't do on its own is send the claim. Nothing goes out without someone approving it first.

What Claims does

Claims automates this whole process. And it's worth knowing exactly what it does, because this is a product you buy on trust.

And that isn't only useful for managing claims. It also gives you something to work with when it's time to negotiate your next rates with your carriers.

Why do it now and not in December

There are seven weeks to go until Black Friday, one of the most significant campaigns of the year for most brands, if not the most important.

Which means that for as long as that campaign runs, the brand sees a bigger peak in sales, which turns into a peak in shipments and possibly a peak in returns afterwards. In short, far more goods in transit than at any other time of year. And what does that translate into? A far higher volume of incidents that have to be handled as they happen, because waiting until January to review what went on is no use at all. For a lot of those incidents, by then the claim arrives too late.

Which is why it makes sense to have the process ready before Black Friday. That way, when incidents start coming up, they can be spotted and claimed there and then, while the window is still open.

Frequently asked questions

Can you claim from a carrier for a lost parcel?

Yes. Carriers have a liability for the goods they transport, within the limits set by the contract and the applicable regulations. The difficulty is usually more about filing the claim in time and with all the paperwork required.

How much does a carrier pay for a lost parcel?

It depends on the carrier and the contract. Some compensate based on the weight of the parcel and others on the value of the goods lost, so the difference between them can be substantial. Which is why it's worth knowing which rule each carrier applies before writing a claim off.

What is the deadline to file a carrier claim?

It depends on the carrier and the type of incident. It can be 7 days, 21 days or several weeks, and they don't all start counting from the same point either. Some go from the expected delivery date and others from the last tracking update. Once the window has passed, the claim can no longer be filed.

Why don't brands claim from their carriers?

Because doing it by hand, case by case, takes time. Every carrier has its own deadlines, requirements and paperwork, and the amount on any single claim often doesn't justify all that work.

The problem is that the money doesn't tend to show up as a loss either. The cost gets filed as part of handling the order, and nothing records that there was an amount the carrier should have paid back.

How do you automate carrier claims?

You need a system that reviews shipments, spots which ones can be claimed, prepares the paperwork needed and follows them up until they're resolved.

Reveni's Claims automates that whole process. Claims need approval before they're sent, and the service charges a percentage of what it manages to recover.