Difficulty in Getting your Logistics Refunds

First of all, you have a time limit to claim a service guarantee failure:

• FedEx: within 15 calendar days of the invoice date.
• UPS: within 15 calendar days from the schedule delivery date.
• DHL: within 15 calendar days from the shipment date.

As you know the carriers do deliver a majority of the packages on-time.  In order to even begin you must have access to an organized list of packages and tracking numbers that are within the time limits.

All carriers have made the extremely simple task of comparing the Actual Delivery Date and Time against the Estimated Delivery Date and Time (EDT), mind-numbingly complex.

In reality, you must have a minimum of three dates/time pairs per tracking number. An EDT is invalid only if the actual shipping date is the same date the package was shipped. Hint: the “ship date” on your bill is a “could be ship date” and only indicates the “billing info” date.  Under certain conditions you will find it is neither of these dates!! 

1. The online tracking is only place to go to obtain an actual ship date. Being optimistic, we will use the “billing info” date and go to online tracking as the last step. Now having the three date/time pairs, we monitored the shipment until delivery or EDT has expired.
2. If a possible late delivery is detected, we go to online tracking information in the next step.
3. If we find the actual ship date is not the same ship date we used for calculating the EDT, we must get a new EDT.  To gather the required information to calculate a new EDT, by hand and depending on the carrier, can now take a lot of time.
4. Having a valid EDT and if we still have a late delivery, the next step is to review the activities in transit for exceptions that do void the service guarantee.
5. In addition to given tracking information all carriers can have additional information, not listed within the online tracking activities, which will also void the service guarantee (e.g. FedEx Thunder Storms), we continue to the next step.
6. We can dispute the charge to obtain a refund.
7. That action produces one of four outcomes: accept, denied, pending or unknown as with UPS sometime responses with nothing.
8. If the dispute is accepted (UPS, FedEx and at DHL it never happens) you are done.
9. If denied (UPS, FedEx and at DHL it never happens), the response could be a valid reason ike a Thunder Storm or be completely vague like not eligible for service guarantee with no reason why.
10. If the denial is questionable or wrong (UPS does claim on-time delivery stating delivery as the same day it was shipped) a phone call argument with a friendly customer service representative is required.
11. If it is pending (always happens at DHL) we must monitor the outcome of the dispute for denial or acceptance.