When the Customer Says the Package Never Arrived

A tracking number proves a parcel reached an address, not the right person.

Of all the chargeback claims a working e-commerce business encounters, the simplest in form is also the easiest to lose without a fight. The customer says the package did not arrive. The merchant looks at a delivery confirmation in their carrier dashboard, assumes the matter is settled, and submits the tracking number. The dispute then comes back lost. The merchant concludes that issuing banks ignore tracking numbers (partly true) and then concludes that the case was unwinnable, which is usually not.

The cardholder has told their bank that the goods did not reach them, and the reason code, in Visa's vocabulary, is 13.1: merchandise or services not received by the agreed delivery date. The issuer's question to the merchant is not whether a parcel was scanned at an address; it is whether that address was, on the balance of evidence, an address connected to the cardholder. Tracking confirms one half of that and is silent on the other half, and the silence is what the issuer rules on by default.

Visa's compelling-evidence framework for 13.1 is more flexible than most merchants realise. A carrier tracking record showing complete delivery, paired with an Address Verification Service (AVS) match of "Y" or "M" on the original authorization, is sufficient on its face; signature confirmation is explicitly not required when AVS clears. The combination matters more than either piece alone. A tracking record without AVS reads as a parcel sent to a plausible-but-unverified destination. AVS without a tracking record reads as a verified billing address with no proof of fulfilment. Together they describe a transaction in which the cardholder's bank confirmed the address, the merchant shipped to that address, and the carrier delivered to that address — a description hard for any issuer to dismiss.

Beyond the AVS-and-tracking floor, signature confirmation, photographs of the package at the door, and IP and device data from the original session each strengthen the case. Where the merchant runs accounts, a record of the customer logging in from the same device a week after delivery is the single most persuasive piece of evidence available, because it is difficult to construct innocently. Communications carry weight too: an email from the customer asking when their order will arrive, sent the day before the carrier scanned it as delivered, undermines a later claim that no order was expected.

The framework has limits. A package delivered to an address the customer can plausibly claim was not theirs cannot be argued out of, no matter how clean the tracking. Where the merchant accepted an AVS "N" (no match) at checkout and shipped anyway, the issuer has the upper hand by default. And if the dispute is filed within the customer's own admission of late delivery and a return of the goods, the rule book gives the cardholder a 15-day waiting period that procedural argument cannot dislodge. In those cases the discipline is to recognise the unwinnable case quickly and refund rather than spending the expert hours required to lose well.

Most chargeback cases that look unwinnable on the merchant's first reading are winnable, and most that the merchant assumes are easy turn out to require evidence that would have been trivial to capture at order time and impossible to reconstruct 3 weeks later. The asymmetry is the argument for routine, ahead-of-time collection: address verification result, IP, device fingerprint, account history, customer correspondence, all stored against the order from the day the order was placed.