50+ Shipping Carrier Service Failures That are Totally Eligible for Refunds8 min read

Have you spent time taking a good, hard look at your shipping invoices?

If not, try it once. You’ll likely end up quite shocked!

Why? You ask. 

You’ll discover that you’ve been charged wrongly more than once.

Shipping invoices are often plagued by errors and discrepancies that could be costing your business valuable dollars month-on-month

When you fail to audit your shipping invoices, you unwittingly become an accomplice to an inefficient shipping carrier.

Or you could follow in the footsteps of other retail businesses that have become increasingly savvy and claim refunds for various shipping carrier service failures using automated shipping audit services like LateShipment.com

Read on for the 50+ service failures that shipping carriers are prone to and how you can save up to 20% on your shipping costs by claiming refunds for them. 

But first…

Understand the Money-Back Guarantee Policy

Money-back guarantee

According to their money-back guarantee policy, shipping carriers offer you a full refund on shipping charges in case of discrepancies from their end. 

Major shipping carriers like FedEx, UPS, and DHL advertise to offer you a full refund on shipping charges in case of a service failure. However, they also often coerce you into signing a money-back guarantee waiver, that prevents you from claiming refunds for their inefficiencies. 

 

By signing a refund waiver, you lose the opportunity to save up to 20% on your shipping expenditure. 

 

For this reason, you mustn’t fall prey to shipping refund waivers to obtain discounts. 

Waivers aside, the fact that shipping carriers are unwilling to provide refunds for their failures is evident from the clauses that govern the refund procedure, the convoluted refund process, and the short-time window to claim them. That’s why it is best you take matters into your own hands.

Here’s Why You Should Take a Closer Look at Your Shipping Invoice

Shipping invoices are, without a doubt, complex. But there is a need to understand them to identify and dispute errors with your shipping carrier. 

 

The onus is on you to understand YOUR shipping invoice because

 

  • It is simply not in the best interest of shipping carriers to own up to their failures. 
  • Shipping carriers are known to hide information on service failures such as late deliveries to prevent themselves from being shown in poor light. 

 

Once you’ve understood your shipping invoice from top to bottom, you can immediately start saving! 

 

Imagine a wrongly calculated Dimensional (DIM) weight of your package making your bill go up to $16 instead of $10. While this $6 additional charge may not seem much in a one-off incident, it may prove to be costly in the long run if repeated with many packages. And it’s money that belongs to you.

 

Once you receive your monthly invoice, you can ensure that every delivery issue or billing discrepancy is identified and have refund claims submitted for each. 

 

Did you know that claiming refunds for service failures like late deliveries could save you 12-14%, and an additional 6-8% could be saved through submission of claims for other billing errors and wrongly-applied surcharges?

This is why it is critical to understand your monthly shipping invoice and optimize your shipping costs. 

Understand the 50+ Service Failures That Are Eligible for Refunds

The 50+ failures of shipping carriers that are eligible for refunds can be separated into service failures and billing errors. Billing errors themselves can be classified separately into surcharges & fees and other billing errors. 

This classification helps you immediately identify and recognize the types of service failures and billing errors and act accordingly when faced with any of them.

Service failures classification

Service Failures

  1. Late Deliveries
  2. Lost Packages
  3. Damaged Packages
  4. Invalid Service Exceptions
  5. Manifested but Not Shipped 
  6. No Proof-of-Delivery

Billing Errors - Surcharges and Additional Fees

  1. Invalid DAS (Delivery Area Surcharge) 
  2. Invalid Extended DAS
  3. Invalid Residential Surcharge
  4. Unauthorized Charges
  5. Chargebacks
  6. Wrongly-Applied Additional Handling Fees
  7. Invalid Address Correction Surcharge
  8. Incorrect Fuel Surcharge
  9. Invalid Hazardous Material Fees
  10. Wrongly-Applied Refusal Fees
  11. Incorrect CoD Collections
  12. Invalid Holiday Exceptions Fee
  13. Wrongly-Applied Minimum Charges
  14. Charges for Re-Delivery
  15. Incorrect Weekly Service Fee
  16. Wrongly-Applied Early AM Fees
  17. Incorrect Saturday Pickup Fees
  18. Incorrect Large Package Surcharges
  19. Discrepancies in International / Customs Fee
  20. Inapplicable Additional Delivery Fee
  21. Incorrect Proof-of-Delivery Fee
  22. Incorrect Domestic Dimensional Fee
  23. Incorrect International Dimensional Fee
  24. Incorrect Duties & Taxes
  25. Wrongly-Applied Pickup Fees
  26. Wrongly-Applied On-Demand Pickup Fees
  27. Incorrect Package Reroute Charges
  28. Duplicate Charge

Other Billing Errors

  1. Missing Discounts
  2. Incorrect Discounts
  3. Misapplied Incentives
  4. Entered Weight / Billed Weight
  5. Void Shipments 
  6. Discrepancies in Calculation of Zone Jumping
  7. Incorrect Combined Weight (CWT) / Multweight (MWT) Shipments
  8. Discrepancies in Insured & Declared Value
  9. Incorrect Weight
  10. Discrepancies in Calculation of Rebates
  11. Incorrect Application of GRI
  12. Incorrect Application of Revenue-Based Thresholds 
  13. Duplicate Tracking Number
  14. Duplicate Invoice 
  15. Missing Account Number
  16. Invalid Account Number
  17. Incorrect Shipper Billed
  18. Misapplied Payments
  19. Incorrect Exchange Rates

You could manually claim refunds for the service failures of your shipping carrier, or you could make use of an automated algorithm-based service to do so. Here’s why the latter is the better option.

Why eCommerce Businesses Should Use a Parcel-Audit Solution

Claiming Refunds is a Hassle

While shipping carriers allow you to file claims manually, it is not exactly a viable option as it is subject to certain limitations. 

  1. It is a tiresome process – Identifying and submitting claims manually is a process that takes up significant time and effort at your end.
  2. It is expensive – The resource cost of claiming refunds is so expensive that you will spend more to get a refund than the compensation you are entitled to receive.
  3. Short eligibility window – Manual claim submission is a tedious process. It might take more than five days to obtain a refund for a single package. Also, refund claims are honored by carriers only if they are filed within a short eligibility window, which can be a problem when submitting multiple claims.
  4. It is error-proneA positive outcome is not guaranteed for a manual claim submission as the communication process with shipping carriers is often inefficient.  

For these reasons, it is best to use a parcel audit solution like LateShipment.com to claim shipping refunds.

Why LateShipment.com’s Automated Refunds Solution?

LateShipment.com’s automated refunds solution effortlessly audits your invoices and helps save up to 20% on your shipping costs. The best part is that it takes less than 2 minutes to set-up and seamlessly integrates with your existing workflow.

LateShipment.com refunds for lost packages
  • 50+ carriers supported – With customers in over 40 countries, we successfully claim refunds from carriers worldwide. 
  • Highly-trained algorithms – Our proprietary technology is built in-house with algorithms trained from tracking over 100M parcels.
  • Human-backed automation – Our automated claims system is human-backed to ensure that you never miss any refunds.
  • Maximum refunds recovery – Apart from common service failures, our systems are built to recover refunds for 50+ carrier errors.
  • No upfront cost – Zero out-of-pocket costs for your business. Pay only a part of the refunds claimed. 
  • Refund claims for previous shipments – We don’t wait for you to ship out packages. Our systems can backtrack up to 45 days and claim refunds even for past shipments. 

How You Can Start Claiming Refunds Right Away

It is never too late to start claiming refunds. Every parcel you ship and get billed for by your shipping carrier, you could be losing an opportunity to claim refunds and save up to 20% on your overall shipping cost.

Here’s how easy it is to start claiming refunds: 

 

  1. Create a LateShipment.com account
  2. Add your shipping carrier credentials
  3. That’s it. you’re all set! Very simple innit?

 

Note: Refunds recovered will be credited directly back to your account.

Our automated shipping refunds solution:

  • Audits your monthly shipping invoices
  • Submits refund claims to your carrier(s) on your behalf
  • Deposits the refunded amount directly into your account
  • Saves up to 20% on your shipping costs

That’s not all!

LateShipment.com does more than just claim refunds on your behalf.

Other Post-Purchase Success Features Of LateShipment.com

LateShipment.com’s Delivery Experience Management platform helps you craft outstanding post-purchase experiences and build long-lasting customer relationships. 

Our groundbreaking post-purchase solutions help businesses effortlessly bridge the post-purchase CX gap and discover new ways to delight and retain customers.

Our high-impact post-purchase offerings allow you to: 

  • Stay on top of order deliveries, particularly those facing delays

Track in-transit shipments in real-time across multiple carriers on a single dashboard.

Receive predictive alerts about parcels facing delivery delays & take remedial action.

  • Over-communicate and reduce customer anxiety post-purchase

Proactively identify and communicate with customers facing delivery issues. 

Automate order status notifications via eMail or SMS throughout the delivery lifecycle.

  • Reinforce your brand identity with custom order-tracking assets

Provide brand-consistent order tracking pages to customers & drive repeat purchases. 

Embed self-serve order tracking widgets on your website and order-related emails.

  • Leverage order tracking moments to increase sales and reduce returns

Increase sales with personalized product recommendations on your tracking page.

Reduce returns by providing relevant product usage information on tracking assets.

  • Know if customers were satisfied or not with their delivery experience

Capture customers’ Delivery Satisfaction (DSAT) rating after every order delivery.

Measure the average DSAT score of every customer to optimize shipping & delivery processes.

  • Access data-rich reports

Gain critical insights about your shipping spend and carriers’ delivery performance across service types and geographies to take data-driven decisions and make shipping efficient.

The best part is, it takes less than 2 minutes to see LateShipment.com in action without any change to your existing workflow. 

The value we add to businesses is most evident when experienced first-hand. Try LateShipment.com now.

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