What to Do if Your Amazon Order Never Arrives but They Say it Was Delivered

We use Amazon a lot here, and for the most part it works beautifully. But on very rare occasion, an Amazon order will be marked as having been delivered even though the order has never been received by the person who ordered it. Here’s what to do if your order from Amazon hasn’t shown up even though Amazon has it marked as delivered.

  

First, it’s important to understand that Amazon uses both UPS (United Parcel Service) and USPS (the United States Post Office) to deliver Amazon orders. And each of these services provides Amazon with the tracking information for your packages. So when Amazon says that an order was delivered, they are relying on what the USPS and UPS tell them. (If instead you did receive the package, but it was damaged, read our article How to Report Damaged or Bad Packaging to Amazon).

In a case like this, where your package has been marked as ‘delivered’, it’s not really useful to track the package, because, of course, the tracking says that the package was delivered.

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So, what should you do when your Amazon order goes missing? Here’s what to do.

What to Do When Your Amazon Order Shows as Delivered but is Actually Missing

On the Amazon help page titled Find a Missing Package That Shows as Delivered, Amazon explains that, essentially, you need to wait 36 hours past the ‘shown as delivered’ time before you can escalate it to Amazon.

During that 36 hours you should:

• Verify the shipping address
• Look for a notice of attempted delivery
• Look around the delivery location for your package
• See if someone else accepted the delivery
• Check your mailbox or wherever else you receive mail.
• Wait out the full 36 hours

Of course, we assume if you are looking for help figuring out what happened to your package that you have already taken these steps, other than perhaps waiting the 36 hours, because they are pretty obvious.

So, assuming that you have already done all of the above, and it’s been at least thirty-six hours since your package was marked as ‘delivered’, your next step is to go the Amazon Contact Us Help page, where you will be able to actually tell Amazon that your order is missing.

Once on that page, you will be offered the option of getting help with an order you have placed, and you will be able to select from any of your recent orders.

After you have selected the missing order go to section 2, which contains a dropdown menu which allows you to select your issue. Click on ‘Where’s my stuff?’.

This will give you a submenu; select ‘Tracking shows delivered but shipment not received’.

Once you have selected ‘Tracking shows delivered but shipment not received’, a third section will display, asking you how you would like to be contacted. We always choose email, because it gives us a written record, and hey, we don’t like being on hold on the telephone.

This will cause a recap of your issue to be displayed, so that you can verify it. This includes an area where you can include a message to the Amazon customer service team.

There is a pre-written message which you can select that says “Please provide latest status on when my Order (sic) will arrive” (we have no idea why they capitalized ‘Order’), and a note clearly meant to encourage you to not instead write your own message: “Customers choosing this option usually receive a quicker response.”.

But you can also choose to write your own message, which will still get a response, “usually within 12 hours”.

If you choose to write your own message, Amazon will tell you to please be sure to include whether “you would like a Replacement, Refund to a gift card, or a Refund to the original Payment method”.

After you click ‘Send Email’ you will see this confirmation:

Within that 12-24 hours, you should receive a response like this:

I’m sorry to hear that you didn’t receive your order #116-0019402 even though the tracking shows delivered. This usually doesn’t happen.

However,There is some delay in the delivery due to some error in the system. In this case I request you to wait till Tuesday, August 2, 2016, end of the day.

If you haven’t received it by Tuesday, August 2, 2016, end of the day, and you’ve checked around the delivery location and with others who may have accepted the package, please contact us through the link below and we’ll be happy to get a refund for you.

Please visit the following link to provide the information we requested:

http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-mi?c=crutxqra3683476340&q=o2r

Rest assured, we’ll continue working hard to ensure that you receive accurate service, and to minimize the chances of anything like this occurring again.

Your cooperation and understanding is highly appreciated.

We look forward to seeing you soon again.

We’d appreciate your feedback. Please use the links below to tell us about your experience today.

Best regards,
pooja

If your order still doesn’t show up, you can then click the link that they have provided to you, and get a refund.

Here is the link to the page to initiate this process:

Go to the Amazon Contact Us page to report a missing package.

In the most recent case we encountered, it turned out that the USPS had delivered the package to the wrong address. A couple of days later, someone from that wrong address brought the package over.

We have to say that Amazon’s use of the post office has caused pretty much all of the delivery problems we’ve encountered. Generally, we have found that the USPS service is far inferior to that of UPS when it comes to delivery errors and issues.