Delivered But Not Received: What the Scan Proves

Delivered, In/At Mailbox. 2:41 pm. COLUMBUS, OH 43215.

That is the whole record. Three facts, produced by a handheld scanner somewhere in the vicinity of the address, and not one of them is the buyer's street number. The buyer's message says the porch was empty all afternoon and asks when the refund is coming.

Both things can be true at once. That is the part nobody says out loud, and it is why the packet that gets read here is not a pile of tracking screenshots — the platform can already see the tracking. It is a short set of facts arranged to fill the gaps the scan leaves open.

Policy as of 2026-08-22. Every page named below was opened that day except where the text says otherwise, and the exceptions are listed at the end.

The same scan, opposite effects on eBay and Amazon

Most of us carry one mental model of the delivered scan across both marketplaces. The written policies do not agree.

eBay's Money Back Guarantee policy (read 2026-08-22) puts it in the action table for item-not-received: "If the seller provided tracking details, eBay may close the case automatically once tracking shows the item has been delivered." The scan is a stopper.

Amazon's buyer-facing A-to-z Guarantee page (checked 2026-08-22; the live page would not open that day, so the wording below is quoted from the Internet Archive's capture of 28 July 2026) lists the eligibility condition for "You haven't received your package" as: "Three days have passed since the latest estimated delivery date OR the tracking shows a delivery confirmation (whichever is sooner)" — together with having contacted the seller more than 48 hours earlier. Read that a second time. On Amazon the delivery confirmation is the accelerant. Without it the buyer waits three days past the estimate. With it they can file as soon as the 48 hours are up.

That last row is vague on purpose, because the honest version is vague. The A-to-z Guarantee Program Policy (read 2026-08-22, in the copy Amazon publishes as a PDF) says you "will have the opportunity to appeal any decision and to provide supporting evidence," that Amazon "may automatically grant a claim in the customer's favour in certain circumstances specified on Seller Central," and that you "may be required to provide certain types of evidence to appeal a decision (e.g. to demonstrate proof of delivery and receipt)." The specific hour counts live on Seller Central pages that need a seller login. Count from the number printed on your own claim notice, not from anything quoted here.

Five conditions in eBay's evidence list, and the one that fails quietly

eBay publishes its standard in full, which makes it the more useful of the two to study. Under "Deciding the outcome when the buyer doesn't receive an item," the policy says it requires all of the following to prove a successful on-time delivery:

1. A tracking number from an integrated carrier, uploaded to eBay, showing a shipping scan before the latest estimated delivery date
2. A delivery status of "delivered" or "attempted delivery"
3. The date of delivery or attempted delivery
4. The recipient's address showing a zip code that matches the Order details page — or, if the zip code is unavailable, a matching city or county
5. Signature confirmation on orders with a total cost of $750 or more

Three of the five arrive on their own if the label came from eBay and the carrier is integrated: the status, the date, and the address record carrying the ZIP. The fifth is not free at all — signature confirmation is a line item you buy, and it only bites once the order clears $750. That leaves the first, and the first is the one that fails without making any noise. The same list, set beside Amazon's and Etsy's, is in four ways a buyer takes the money back; what follows is only about the two conditions sellers misread.

The acceptance scan has to land before the latest estimated delivery date. Not before delivery — before the estimate. Buy a label on Friday, drop the parcel in a blue collection box on Saturday afternoon, and the acceptance scan can be dated Monday. The item may still arrive early. Measured against this clause, the evidence does not. I have lost one that arrived two days ahead of schedule, on a parcel where the delivery was never the problem and the drop-off was.

Notice too what condition 4 does not say. Street address. It says zip code, falling back to city or county. That is a much weaker standard than the card networks apply, which is why the same order can survive an eBay case and lose a chargeback on identical paperwork: an issuer is looking for the street, and a ZIP-only capture of the tracking page does not carry one (what a representment packet has to contain).

A device said something, at a moment, sometimes with no location at all

Here is the finding that changed how I write these responses.

The Postal Service's own inspector general audited stop-the-clock scans and published the numbers in Package Delivery Scanning — Nationwide, Report DR-AR-18-001 (27 October 2017, read 2026-08-22). Out of two billion scans across six months, the auditors isolated 25.5 million that occurred between 7 pm and the carrier's clock-out the next morning. Using GPS location data they identified about 1.9 million improper stop-the-clock scans, performed at delivery units instead of at the delivery location. A further 8.3 million — 33 percent of that sample — had no corresponding location data, 6 million of them scanned on older Intelligent Mail Devices, which do not record GPS, and 2.3 million on newer Mobile Delivery Devices, where the auditors put the missing data down, for a majority of those scans, to GPS signal obstruction.

The report is nearly nine years old and the device fleet has moved on since. The mechanism has not. A delivered scan is a handheld asserting an event, GPS is captured where the signal allows, and by the Postal Service's own accounting a meaningful share of scans carry no location evidence behind them.

The customer-facing record is thinner still. The USPS Tracking FAQ (article 000007991, page updated 26 May 2026, read 2026-08-22) says tracking gives you "delivery and/or attempted delivery information, including date and time of delivery as well as the delivery location of the item (mailbox, reception desk, neighbor, etc.)." A category, not an address.

So write the response accordingly. "Tracking shows delivered" is a sentence the case handler can already see. "Delivered 2:41 pm to the 43215 zip code on the order, at the front door, accepted 18 August at the Groveport annex, three days inside the estimate, label bought through eBay to the address in Order details" is built out of the five conditions, in the policy's own order, and takes forty seconds to type.

The proof-of-delivery letter you cannot get afterwards

There is a document called a Proof of Delivery. It is close to exactly what this case wants, and most sellers cannot get one.

The USPS Proof of Delivery FAQ (article 000007102, read 2026-08-22) describes an emailed letter carrying the delivery information, the recipient's name, an image of the signature, the printed name and address, the delivery location attribute such as Front Door or Porch, the mail class and the package weight. Then it names the catch: "Proof of Delivery is only available for items where a Signature Confirmation service has been purchased or is included in the mail class" — Signature Confirmation, Restricted Delivery, Adult Signature Required, Priority Mail Express, Registered Mail.

Ground Advantage with no extra services buys none of that. So the strongest single piece of evidence in an item-not-received case is chosen at the moment you buy postage, days before any buyer says anything, for a few dollars. That is the thing I got wrong for the better part of a year: I priced signature confirmation against the postage line rather than against the orders it would have saved. eBay's $750 rule is a floor for coverage, not a recommendation.

FedEx fills part of the gap another way. Picture Proof of Delivery, announced 22 June 2022 for express and ground residential deliveries in the US and Canada that are released without a signature, is free and requires neither an account nor enrolment — the photo shows the location of the package and comes up in the ordinary tracking tools, which means the seller can pull it with the tracking number (FedEx newsroom, read 2026-08-22). A photograph of the correct porch settles more cases than arguing does. UPS offers a delivery photo of its own, but nothing on ups.com would answer a request on 2026-08-22, so its terms are not stated here — read them in your own account before you count on one.

Answer inside three business days, before the case leaves your hands

Sequence matters more than contents here, because both platforms punish escalation rather than disagreement.

On eBay the buyer reports, and you must respond within three business days with tracking information, delivery updates, or a refund. From that same third business day the buyer may ask eBay to step in, and their window to do so runs to 21 business days after the report date. eBay's seller protections page (read 2026-08-22) then lists, under loss of protections, this line: "If eBay steps in to help with a return or item not received request." Letting the clock run does not preserve your position. It removes protections you held on day one.

So the first move is a message inside the case, the day it opens, carrying the five conditions in eBay's order and nothing else. Not an argument about porch pirates. Not a link to a public tracking page. The second move, same day, is two questions that cost nothing and often end the matter: has anyone else at the address taken a parcel in, and is the address on the order still where they live. A fair share close right there.

The third move, when the buyer is neither lying nor mistaken, is to ask them to open a Missing Mail search — available once the item has been late or missing seven days or more, and it does sometimes produce the parcel. Both platforms read a seller who is running a search differently from a seller who is quoting policy at a customer.

When the scan is honest and the parcel is still gone

At some point this stops being a dispute and becomes a loss, and the money has to come from somewhere other than the buyer.

Missing Mail — The Basics (article 000007968, page updated 19 May 2026, read 2026-08-22) sets the threshold plainly: if an item has been lost, late or missing for 7 days or more, you can submit a search request at MissingMail.USPS.com, file a claim on insured items that meet the timeframe, or take it to a Post Office. The search request and the indemnity claim are separate things running on separate clocks, and the waiting periods and filing deadlines vary by service class in ways that will cost you the claim if you guess at them.

One warning for the whole sequence: refunding the buyer does not extinguish the carrier claim, but it changes who may file and what the carrier will ask for. Read the claim rules before you press refund, not after.

Three lines in the message box, and the dates behind them

The response that gets read is short, and every line in it maps to a written condition rather than to a feeling:

• Where and when it was accepted, with that date set against the latest estimated delivery date on the order.
• The delivery event, quoted so the zip code on the scan sits next to the zip code on the Order details page, together with whatever delivery location attribute the carrier recorded.
• Then the label itself: signature, adult signature, delivery photo, or a plain statement that there was no extra service on it.

Everything else is commentary. If those three lines come out thin, they were thin before the buyer ever wrote to you, and the fix is upstream at the packing table rather than in the case.

Then put two dates in the calendar today. Day 3 from the buyer's report, which is when eBay can be asked to step in and your protections start eroding. Day 7 from the point the parcel went late, which is the general threshold for a Missing Mail search — though Registered Mail wants fourteen days from mailing and Parcel Select wants fourteen as well. Nobody is going to remind you of either one.

---

Opened on 2026-08-22: eBay's Money Back Guarantee policy — the item-not-received action table, the evidence-of-successful-delivery list, and the appeals section — and eBay's seller protections page; the USPS FAQ articles on Tracking (000007991, page dated 26 May 2026), Proof of Delivery (000007102) and Missing Mail (000007968, page dated 19 May 2026); USPS Office of Inspector General report DR-AR-18-001, Package Delivery Scanning — Nationwide, 27 October 2017; the FedEx announcement of Picture Proof of Delivery dated 22 June 2022; and the A-to-z Guarantee Program Policy in the PDF Amazon publishes.

Two gaps, named rather than papered over. Amazon's buyer-facing A-to-z page was closed to me on the day, so the eligibility wording above is quoted from an archived capture of 28 July 2026; it is a public page and worth opening yourself once. UPS's delivery photo is left undescribed because ups.com returned nothing at all that day. Beyond those, Amazon's seller-side clocks — how long an appeal stays open, and what evidence it will ask for — live on Seller Central behind a login. That is why the appeal row of the table ends without a number, and why your own claim notice, not this page, sets your deadline.

The eBay figures are on a 180-day recheck here. The Amazon eligibility text gets re-read sooner, because it is quoted from a capture rather than from the page.

None of this is legal advice, and a case handler reading your file has the platform's wording in front of them rather than mine.