Have you ever had that one parcel you were really excited about just vanish into the void?
Well, you’re not alone. But as annoying as it is for us, the consumer, the retailers are having a real nightmare. New data shows they’re losing billions a year because couriers aren’t refunding them back for lost and damaged parcels, even though they’re legally entitled to claim the money back.
Around 42 million parcels are estimated to be lost or damaged in a year
PA Archive
From our data here in the UK we suggest that there’s around 2.1 billion that retailers are essentially missing out on via what would be issues related with courier deliveries, that being lost or damaged packages.
From our research, we have around about 4.2 billion parcels that that were shipped in 2024, and out of that, roughly speaking, 1% of all of those packages are lost or damaged, which equates to around about 42 million parcels, which is obviously hugely significant when it comes to not only your enterprise brands, but your SMEs as well at the same time there. It’s just on a slightly different scale.
I think the couriers are under increasing pressure to deliver, and with the likes of online and e-com. And Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and really if we think about those two specific dates, they kind of go on for at least two months.
So during that period of time, the pressure for the couriers and the pressure for the drivers as well to have to deliver a set amount, but also to have to pick up a set amount, that naturally is going to create problems, whether it is a missed delivery or whether it is theft.
So what’s causing this disconnect and this huge loss for retailers, and what can they do about it?
From a retailer point of view, when actually going to claim back the cash that they’re owed, those processes and those systems and the lack of technology between the retailer and the courier when it comes to being able to recover that kind of cash flow, anything that’s lost or damaged, generally speaking from what we see is quite old and antiquated, workflows.
And therefore at that point, it’s either really one of two things: you either go through and hire a team and add more costs and layers to the business, in order to be able to go after that money that they’re owed back, or they just simply just don’t do it.
We’re now at a point where retailers can now adopt technology similar to ourselves, through the use of AI where we can go after that money and get that back for what they’re owed.
And that’s where the introduction and the technology over the past 18 months to two years with AI allows us to do that at scale.
Imagine as a human trying to be on top of hundreds of thousands of claims on a monthly basis, it’s just unattainable.
You also have a communication element where you use AI to communicate with the couriers – what constitute as a legitimate claim and what constitute as a non-legitimate claim, which we wouldn’t submit to the couriers.
So again, filtering out everything and making the process far more streamlined, but then also being able to use AI to challenge those rejections from the couriers that we believe and our retailers believe are actually a legitimate claim.
From that point of view, we can then bring back the data into our platform and help the retailers understand where they’re potentially going wrong. All the data around how much money they might be losing, how much we’re gaining them back, and how we can improve that success rate.
And what we’ve seen from retailers is generally anywhere between 20% and 30% is their success rate when dealing with claims with couriers, whereas our platform can get success rates on average up to 70 to 72%.
So we can do everything on scale, whilst also doing it at a cost which is, you know, far inferior to having to hire masses of teams, really, and that’s what our platform would come in.