Unfiled vendor and carrier claims are leaking money — here's how to track them
Every time a carrier loses a parcel or a vendor ships short, there is a credit or refund sitting uncollected somewhere in your supply chain. Carriers will pay it — but only if someone files on time and follows up. In most operations, nobody does. The claim sits in an email thread, the deadline passes, and the money disappears quietly. Here's why it keeps happening and how to stop it.
The short answer
Carrier and vendor claims live completely outside Shopify and ShipStation. They have no status field, no alert, no age counter, and no owner unless you assign one. Carriers enforce filing windows — often measured in weeks or a few months depending on the carrier and service type — so a claim that is "being handled" and a claim that is dead look identical until you miss the cutoff. The fix is simple but requires discipline: log every open claim in one place with a deadline, an owner, and a required status check every week.
Why claims go unfiled and uncollected
Claims live outside your normal ops systems
Shopify tracks order status. ShipStation tracks fulfillment status. Neither one tracks whether a UPS claim has been filed, whether the FedEx investigation is open or closed, or whether a vendor issued a credit memo for the short pallet from three weeks ago. When a claim is born — usually in an email or a phone call — it lives in someone's inbox and nowhere else. If that person leaves, gets busy, or simply forgets, the claim dies with it.
There's no single owner
Receiving discovers a short shipment. The warehouse manager emails the vendor. The vendor replies asking for photos. Someone from customer service follows up. Meanwhile the carrier claim for the damaged outer cartons was started by a different person on a different day, and no one is sure who is handling it now. This is not a people problem — it's a process problem. When a task doesn't have one named owner, it belongs to no one.
Nobody tracks the deadline
Carriers enforce filing windows, and those windows vary by carrier, service type, and claim type. According to Shippo's claims guide and Rollo's carrier reference, UPS requires notice of claim within 60 days of the shipment date, USPS gives roughly 60 days for damage or missing contents claims (with variation by service), and FedEx allows 90 calendar days for domestic damaged or missing-contents claims but as few as 21 days for international shipments. Concealed shortage claims — where the box arrived sealed but contents were missing — may require you to notify the carrier within five business days of discovery, according to freight claims resources at LegalClarity and SupplierWiki.
The pattern is consistent across carriers: the window is finite, it starts from the shipment or delivery date, and missing it forfeits the claim regardless of how valid it is.
Vendor shortage claims have their own leakage problem
Short shipments from vendors — a purchase order for 100 units that arrives with 87 — generate a shortage claim against the vendor rather than a carrier. These claims are easier to lose than carrier claims because there's no external filing system forcing a deadline. The vendor may dispute the count, request a signed receiving document, or simply go quiet. Weeks pass, the inventory discrepancy gets absorbed, and the credit never comes.
How to fix it, step by step
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Create a claims log today. A shared spreadsheet is fine to start. Columns: claim type (carrier or vendor), carrier or vendor name, tracking number or PO number, shipment date, date discovered, deadline to file, current status, owner, next action, and amount at stake. Every new incident gets a row before any email is sent.
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Assign one owner per claim, not one team. The owner is the single person responsible for moving the claim forward. They do not have to do every step themselves, but they are accountable for knowing the status at all times.
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Set the deadline when you open the claim, not when you remember to. Look up the carrier's policy for the service used and enter the filing deadline in the log the same day the incident is discovered. For concealed shortages, this step is urgent — you may have only a few business days to notify the carrier.
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Attach evidence immediately. Photos of damaged packaging, a signed receiving note showing short count, the bill of lading, the original packing list — gather these while the shipment is still accessible. Evidence that is not collected at delivery is often impossible to reconstruct later, and carriers can and do reject claims for lack of documentation.
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Review the log every week. Put a recurring slot on the calendar. The agenda is simple: for every open claim, has the status changed? Is the deadline approaching in the next two weeks? Does the owner need anything to move it forward? Claims that are reviewed weekly get closed. Claims that are reviewed when someone remembers to look at them get dropped.
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Treat an uncollected claim like an unpaid invoice. It is money your business is owed. An unpaid invoice would not be left in an email thread with no follow-up for months. A carrier or vendor claim should not be either. If a claim goes unanswered for more than a week, escalate — call instead of email, loop in a manager, or dispute through the carrier's formal claims portal.
How to stop losing these silently
The underlying problem is the same one that causes paid orders to fall between Shopify and ShipStation: no exception lives in a system unless someone puts it there. Claims, like stuck orders, are invisible by default.
StuckOrders is a read-only exception queue over Shopify, ShipStation, and CSV data. Every item that surfaces — an order that never shipped, a return that never closed, a gap in fulfillment — gets an owner, an age, and a next action, exactly the same structure a claims log needs. When you're ready to file, StuckOrders can export a claims packet with the order history, tracking details, and timeline already assembled, so you're not hunting through three systems to build the evidence the carrier requires.
If you want to see what's currently slipping through your operation, the free 30-day stuck-order audit pulls the last month of exceptions and shows you what went unworked — including orders that may have carrier or vendor issues attached to them.