How to File a Claim for a Lost or Damaged Shipment

Where you file depends on one thing: whose account bought the label. That determines who is liable, who processes the claim, and which deadline applies — and getting it wrong usually means finding out after the window has closed.

There are three paths, and most operations use more than one without having mapped which shipments fall down which.

Path one: you added ShipStation’s insurance

If the shipment carried ParcelGuard, Shipsurance or Total Shipping Protection, the claim starts inside ShipStation.

You file from the shipment record in the Shipments grid by clicking the provider link in the Insurance column. If you cannot see that column, it is hidden rather than absent — enable it from the Columns button. ShipStation’s claims documentation covers each provider.

One exception worth knowing before you need it: if you connected a personal Shipsurance account rather than using ShipStation’s, you file through the Shipsurance portal instead and the in-app link will not be there. ShipStation’s test for which you have is whether Settings → Shipping → Insurance shows an Add Funds option for Shipsurance. If it does not, it is a personal account.

For Total Shipping Protection claims, ShipStation’s instruction is to keep everything: the packaging and the damaged goods as received, because photographs may be required. Do not dispose of anything before the claim completes.

Path two: the label came from ShipStation Carriers

This is the path people get wrong, and it is the one that produces the “the carrier says it’s lost, now what” question.

If you bought the label through ShipStation Carriers — UPS from ShipStation, FedEx from ShipStation and the rest — you do not claim with the carrier. ShipStation states it directly for UPS:

ShipStation manages all loss or damage claims for shipments created using UPS from ShipStation. Claims must be filed through ShipStation rather than UPS.

— ShipStation, File a Claim for UPS from ShipStation

So a UPS tracking page saying the parcel is lost is not the start of a UPS claim. It is evidence for a ShipStation one. The claim form is ShipStation’s, and the requirements are specific:

• Within 60 days of the scheduled delivery date. Not 60 days from when you noticed, and not from when the carrier gave up. The clock starts on the date it was due.
• Damage claims need photos of both the damaged packaging and the contents.
• Every required field completed. ShipStation states partially filled forms cannot be processed — an incomplete claim is not a delayed claim, it is a rejected one.

On timing afterwards, once UPS approves: postage is credited to your ShipStation account within 30 days, and reimbursement for the lost or damaged goods within six weeks. If UPS needs more from you, it arrives as an email with the subject line “Request for supporting documentation.”

There is a coverage figure in that article and I would treat it as a check-your-own-account item rather than a general rule. ShipStation states the maximum coverage for UPS as 90 GBP total, with the label cost included in that amount. The currency suggests it was written for a particular region, and ShipStation does not publish an equivalent elsewhere. If the value of a lost parcel matters to you, confirm the limit that applies to your account before assuming it covers the goods.

Also note the direction of that “label cost included” clause. The cap is on the total, so the postage you are refunded comes out of the same allowance as the goods.

Path three: your own carrier account

If you connected your own UPS, FedEx, DHL or USPS account, the label is the carrier’s and so is the claim. You file in their portal, on their terms, under whatever liability your contract specifies.

ShipStation links out to the common ones rather than handling them, and the claims article carries the destinations by country — USPS, UPS, FedEx and DHL Express for US accounts, with separate lists for Canada, Australia and the UK.

Carrier insurance you bought through ShipStation follows this path too. If you selected Carrier as the insurance type on a shipment rather than ShipStation’s own provider, that is coverage from the carrier, and the claim goes to the carrier even though you bought it inside ShipStation.

The distinction that decides everything

Two shipments can look identical in the Shipments grid, be the same carrier and the same service, and have completely different claims processes — because one was bought on ShipStation’s account and the other on yours.

That is worth knowing in advance rather than at the point of loss, and it is answerable in a minute: your Carriers settings show which accounts are ShipStation Carriers and which are your own. If you run both, as most accounts above a certain size do, then your claims process is genuinely two processes and whoever handles them needs to know which is which.

What to do before you need any of this

Decide the insurance question deliberately rather than per shipment. An automation rule can add cover at import on any criteria you like — order value, contents, destination — which is more reliable than a packer remembering. How that rule works, and the one thing it cannot set covers the mechanics, including that the insured amount always takes the order’s Amount Paid.

Know your uninsured exposure. ShipStation is clear that not every carrier provides default coverage or the option to buy more, and it does not publish per-carrier liability figures — its instruction is to check with the carrier. So the honest position is that your uninsured exposure is a number only your carrier can give you, and it is worth having before a pallet-load goes missing rather than after.

Watch the clock rather than the outcome. The 60-day UPS window runs from the scheduled delivery date, and a parcel that is merely late for three weeks before anyone concludes it is lost has already spent half of it. The practical control is the Delivery Exceptions filter in the Shipments grid — ShipStation tracks that status and does not email anyone about it, so a shipment can sit in exception indefinitely without anyone starting a claim.

Keep the packaging. It is the single most common reason a damage claim fails, and it costs nothing to make it a rule at the returns bench.

What a claim will not recover

Worth being plain about, because it changes whether the process is worth the time on small parcels.

A claim recovers the declared value and the postage, subject to whatever limit applies. It does not recover the labour of remaking the order, the second label to reship it, the customer who does not order again, or the margin on a replacement you sent goodwill before the claim resolved.

For a low-value parcel, the arithmetic often says reship immediately and skip the claim. That is a legitimate answer, and it is a different answer from not knowing the claim existed.