Attempts, holds and refusals: what happens when nobody answers

When a rider reaches a door and the delivery does not happen, the parcel does not vanish into a black box. It takes one of two recorded outcomes, comes back to the warehouse, and goes out again. Default three attempts, configurable up to five, and on reaching the threshold the parcel is cancelled and returned to you.

Knowing the mechanics matters because it tells you how long an item is out of your hands, what it costs, and where you can intervene.

Hold and refusal are different things

They look similar on a tracking page and they mean different things operationally.

• A hold means the delivery could not be completed. Nobody answered, the address could not be found, or the customer asked for a different day
• A refusal means the customer was there and declined the parcel

Both require a reason code from a configurable list, free-text detail, and evidence attached by the rider. That is what makes your return rate readable by cause rather than arriving as a single number. Why COD parcels come back covers the causes themselves.

What happens to the parcel next

1. 01The rider records the outcome with its reason code and evidence
2. 02The parcel is set to returning to the warehouse
3. 03On arrival it is scanned in again. Nothing re-enters stock without that scan
4. 04The attempt counter increments on the inbound scan, not at the door
5. 05The parcel is back in stock and can be put on another run

Step three is the control that stops a parcel being nominally returned but physically unaccounted for. Step four is why the counter is trustworthy: it moves when the building takes custody, not when a rider taps a button in a van.

The decision at the threshold

When the attempt threshold is reached the parcel stops being an automatic retry and becomes a decision. A human in the back office either cancels it and queues the return to you, or authorises one more attempt, and either decision is recorded against their name.

That is deliberate. An automatic fourth or fifth van trip on a customer who has already refused twice is a cost with no decision behind it, so the system stops and asks.

The return to you, as its own journey

A cancelled parcel does not teleport back. It becomes a return to shipper and is assigned to a run, carried, and handed over to you, with the handover scanned exactly as a collection is. Three statuses cover it: RTS assigned, RTS in transit, RTS delivered.

You are told when the return leg starts rather than discovering it when a rider arrives, which is the difference between a return you planned for and a box on your doorstep.

Where you can actually intervene

The gap between the first hold and the second attempt is the cheapest intervention available and almost nobody uses it. The parcel is back at the warehouse and feels out of reach, but the customer is still interested; they were simply not in.

One message asking when they will be home converts a real share of holds into deliveries. The second attempt then goes out against a time that someone has agreed to, rather than against the same guess that failed.

What not to do

Do not raise your attempt threshold. The ceiling is five and the default is three, and a third refusal from the same customer is not a probability problem. Moving the threshold up keeps the item out of stock longer and buys more van trips, not more deliveries.

The threshold is a cost control, not a persistence setting.

Two edge cases worth knowing

Opened at the door and refused

Under an allow-to-open arrangement, if the customer opens the parcel and the item is not as specified, the delivery charge applies by weight despite the non-delivery. It requires rider evidence and is one of the two exceptions in the published tariff. The commercial logic is that the trip was completed and the problem was the listing.

A cancellation you caused after handover

If a seller instructs a customer to cancel after the parcel has been handed to us, or had already cancelled with the customer before handover, the charge applies by weight. The back office applies it with evidence and it is disputable by you. Both exceptions exist so the ordinary rule can stay simple: everything else undelivered is free.

Reading it on your side

Every transition carries the actor, the source and the timestamp, and the history is append-only, so a correction is a new row rather than an edit. If a parcel is not where you expect it, the order history says what happened and who did it. What each parcel status means maps the statuses to the stages, and what a courier does with your parcel covers the full ten-stage journey.

If you want to price a parcel before any of this applies to it, the pricing calculator will quote it from the weight and dimensions.