A missed delivery is not a lost parcel, and the gap between those two things is several days of somebody worrying unnecessarily. Here is the actual sequence, and the small number of things that change how it ends.
What a courier does, in order
Practice varies between carriers, but the shape is consistent across the Indian networks.
| Step | What happens | Roughly when |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rider arrives, nobody available | Day of first attempt |
| 2 | Rider calls the number on the shipment | Same visit, at the door |
| 3 | Parcel goes back to the local hub | That evening |
| 4 | One or two further attempts | Over the following days |
| 5 | Held at the hub for collection | A few days |
| 6 | Returned to sender | After that |
Nothing is thrown away and nothing is charged again at any of those steps.
The one field that decides most of this
Step 2 is where a delivery is saved or lost, and it depends entirely on whose phone number is on the order.
If a gift is going straight to the recipient and your number is on it, the rider calls a person who is four hundred kilometres away and cannot open a door. You then have to reach the recipient, who has to reach the rider, who has usually moved on.
Put the recipient’s number on a direct delivery. It is the single highest-value field on the form and it is the one most often filled in wrongly. What we need from you before design starts →
Gated societies, which are their own category
A guard who will not accept parcels is the commonest cause of a failed attempt in urban India, and it is entirely fixable from the address line.
- Name the tower or block, not only the society
- Add the flat number in the format the guard’s register uses
- If the guard desk does accept parcels, say so in the address
- If it does not, the recipient has to come down, which makes the phone number critical
For a hostel or campus the same problem exists in a stricter form, with a gate that a rider may not pass at all. Gift delivery to a hostel or PG →
If it comes back to us
An undelivered parcel returns here rather than disappearing. What happens next is a conversation about why: usually a wrong flat number, a phone that was never answered, or a recipient who had travelled.
We resend to a corrected address. What we cannot do is resend to the same address that already failed and hope for a different outcome.
The address can be corrected any time before dispatch without any of this happening at all. Changing an order after placing it →
Preventing it, in four lines
Recipient’s phone number, on direct deliveries. The whole of step 2.
Flat, floor and tower. Not just the society name.
A landmark, for anywhere a map is unreliable, which is most of India.
A midweek arrival. Dispatch is weekly on Mondays and transit is 3 to 5 days across most of the country, so parcels naturally land midweek — which is when somebody is more likely to be reachable than on a Sunday.
Frequently asked
Does a missed delivery cost me anything? No. Reattempts are part of what the courier does, and delivery is charged once per order rather than once per attempt.
How many times will they try? Usually two or three, spread over the following days, then the parcel waits at the hub.
Can the address be changed while it is out for delivery? Not reliably. Before dispatch it is straightforward; after dispatch you are asking a courier to redirect a parcel already in its network.
What if the recipient is travelling for a fortnight? Do not send it yet. A parcel cannot wait that long in a hub, and it will come back — which costs more days than simply ordering a week later would have.
Part of our guide to ordering a personalised gift. See also: when a gift arrives after the occasion and do you deliver to my pin code.
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