The clauses that decide who pays when a parcel goes missing

Start with the number that matters: Four carriers compared on ceilings, damage windows and claim deadlines. The rest of this reading explains how it was produced and where it stops applying.

Duty and the compensation ceiling are both anchored to the same declared number. Lowering it lowers both, by the same mechanism, at the same moment.

The parcels in our sample with a declared value near a threshold showed the widest estimate error, because the duty term moves non-linearly there. If your figure sits within 10% of a threshold, budget the upper bound.

Declare accurately and keep the order record. A plausible figure with evidence survives a claim; a precise figure without evidence does not.

Free storage runs 30 to 90 days depending on the agent, and the clock start differs. Insurance runs from the same declared number that duty is calculated on, which is why the three decisions belong together.

The claim window, not the ceiling, is what most people lose money on. Seven days on the narrow end and thirty on the broad end: recording the delivery date costs nothing and preserves the claim.

• Check which clock start applies before relying on a storage deadline.
• Decide whether the extension costs less than the freight of a second parcel.
• Photograph the parcel before opening it, on the day it arrives.

Three risks account for most of the money lost in our sample: an inaccurate declaration, an unmeasured packed dimension, and a claim window that closed before the parcel was opened.

Ranked by expected cost rather than by likelihood, the declaration sits first: it is uncommon and expensive, which is the worst combination for a risk you can address in a single field.

• Measure packed dimensions before the freight payment, not after.
• Declare accurately and keep the order record.
• Photograph the parcel on the day it arrives, before opening it.
• Note the claim deadline in a calendar on the delivery date.

With 13 entries averaging $41.71, pants/shorts ranks 5 of 8 by item value in our census. What makes it distinctive is not the price but how it packs.

Weight bands across the sample run 38 light, 44 mid and 14 heavy. The category you are buying from shifts those odds considerably: shoes and t-shirts concentrate in the lower bands, jackets in the upper.

• Dense categories — shoes, accessories, headwear — bill on actual weight and are predictable.
• Bulky categories — jackets, hoodies — bill on volume and change at packing.
• Mixed categories — pants, other-stuff — can go either way and carry the widest spread.

Across the eleven agents we checked, fee models fall into three shapes — percentage, tiered and flat. Which one is cheapest depends on your order size, and the difference at $150 is larger than the difference between lanes.

Free storage windows run from 30 to 90 days, and the clock start differs: warehouse check-in at some agents, purchase at others. That difference is worth about a week, which matters more than the window length at the margin.

Published fee table

Whether the model is readable without opening a ticket.

Storage clock start

Check-in or purchase — a week of difference.

Consolidation policy

Whether it is offered, and whether it restarts the packing clock.

Claims documentation

Whether compensation terms are published rather than quoted on request.

The checklist is deliberately short. Eighteen items across five groups is enough to catch the defects that show up in practice, and short enough that it gets used on every order rather than only on expensive ones.

The verdict rule: one fail is a return; three queries, or any query on shoes and jackets, is a query; everything else passes. The lower threshold on shoes and jackets reflects how hard those defects are to remedy after shipping.

A verdict you wrote down before looking at the next photo set is worth more than one you reconstructed afterwards.

Three source labels separate what we know from what we assume. Item prices are published figures; freight, duty and fee ranges are modelled from published terms; the transit figures are measured.

Measured

Stage timestamps and weights from the 96-entry sample, collected on 2026-10-05.

Community-reported

Patterns that recur in buyer discussions and that we could not reproduce ourselves.

Published

Read from carrier tariffs, agent fee pages and destination thresholds.

Not measured

Anything we could not source. Written as such rather than estimated.

The known biases are listed rather than hidden. Weight bands are assigned from category baselines rather than weighed individually — that is the largest source of error in the census and it is stated on every page that uses it.

Sample sizes are given for every range on this site. A range without a sample size is not a measurement, it is an opinion.

Four terms carry most of the misunderstanding: billed weight is not scale weight, rehearsal is not QC, and consolidation is not packing.

Landed cost

Item plus domestic delivery plus service fee plus freight plus duty plus insurance. Six segments, not one.

Billed weight

The greater of scale weight and volumetric weight. What the tariff applies to.

Volumetric weight

Volume in cubic centimetres divided by a divisor, usually 5000.

Rehearsal

Packing the parcel before the international payment so freight can be quoted on packed dimensions.

Consolidation

Combining parcels from several sellers into one shipment. Not the same as packing.

QC

Photographs taken at the warehouse before shipping; a separate step from rehearsal.

The common misuses are predictable: “billed weight” used to mean scale weight, “consolidation” used for combining items from a single seller, and “landed cost” used for the item price plus freight alone.

• Billed weight ≠ scale weight.
• Consolidation ≠ packing.
• Rehearsal ≠ QC.
• Landed cost ≠ item price + freight.

Comparing calculators by their outputs flatters all of them. Comparing them by their omissions is what tells you which number to trust.

The common omission is the volumetric step, and the more dangerous version is applying it silently. A silent application produces a number nobody can reproduce, which is worse than an obvious omission.

1. Enter a parcel with high volume and low weight.
2. If freight does not change, the volumetric step is absent.
3. Then change only the declared value.
4. If the total does not change, duty is not modelled.