A paid-for order never arrived: what to do and how much the shop owes you
On 2 August I paid for some memory — $684. Delivery was promised for the 7th. I received the goods on the 23rd, and the shop agreed to pay compensation. I did not go to court, did not hire a lawyer and did not leave the house. Below is the whole route step by step, with dates, sums and documents.
On 2 August I paid for some memory — $684. Delivery was promised for the 7th. I received the goods on the 23rd, and the shop agreed to pay compensation. I did not go to court, did not hire a lawyer and did not leave the house. Below is the whole route step by step, with dates, sums and documents.
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If there is no time to read: five actions right now
1. Find the order confirmation email. It states the delivery date — that is what you agreed. Not what the site shows now.
2. Calculate the compensation. For late delivery of prepaid goods the usual measure is a daily percentage of the price. It is calculated on the price of the goods, without the delivery charge.
3. Write a formal claim. Not a message to support but a document: who, what, when, how much is owed, where to pay it, the deadline for a reply.
4. Send it through three channels at once — email, the form on the site, and registered post. Registered post can be sent online for about $2 without going anywhere.
5. Cancel nothing. Not with a button on the site, not verbally on the phone.
What follows is how that looked in reality and why each step is what it is.
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What happened to the paid order
2 August, 21:28. An email arrives from the shop: the order is paid, delivery date 7 August, window 13:00–15:00. The sum is $684: $678 for the memory and $6 for courier delivery to the door.
7 August. Nobody comes. Nobody rings. No text, no email about a change.
8 August. The same.
9 August. Half an hour before he appears a text arrives, then the courier rings: he is at the door. I am not at home — I did not know he was coming, and for the last two days nobody had been in touch. I answered sharply. The courier leaves.
An hour later the delivery service rings: "the courier reports that you refused the order". I start explaining, I am interrupted with "so you cannot accept it?", I say "not right now", and they hang up.
10 August. In my account the status reads: delivery cancelled. From the shop, silence. No call, no email, no text.
Then two weeks in which the shop did not contact me once on its own initiative. Over that time the status in my account managed to change to "in transit", after which a banner appeared: "the order will be cancelled when the reservation period expires, collect it in time". Collect it — when courier delivery was paid for as a separate line.
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Why it turned out that way — and it is not a conspiracy against you
The most useful thing I took from this story: nobody at the shop decided to ignore me. You simply do not exist in their system until you become a document with a number.
Delivery is outsourced, and its failure is invisible to the shop. The courier reported "customer refused" — for the shop's system the order is closed. After that no human looks at it.
First-line support sees not what you wrote but the ticket's category. My enquiry with the claim attached was closed by an operator the same evening the goods were handed over, under the category "Delivery". Nobody read the demand for compensation inside the ticket.
Departments do not talk to each other. The email was answered by somebody in the business-clients department: "not our region, contact your own". One company, one legal entity — but internally they are arranged so that a letter can go to the wrong place and stay there.
The bot works to its own script. The goods returned to the warehouse, the automation moved the order into "awaiting collection" mode and began threatening cancellation. No malice — just a branch of an algorithm not designed for this case.
The conclusion is simple: while you are speaking with your voice, you do not exist. You appear when a document with an incoming number appears. Everything described below is a way of getting that number.
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Who I am and what you will not get from me
I am not a lawyer. I have worked with AI for five years, and in this story my role was not knowledge of the law but the fact that I assembled the claim through an AI assistant and took the matter through to money without travelling anywhere.
This is not legal advice but an account of one real case. Your situation may differ in details, and if the sum is serious for you, show the documents to a live lawyer before sending. But the route itself — from the email to the calculation, from the calculation to the claim, from the claim to a tracking number — works the same way in almost any dispute with a shop.
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Six steps
| Step | What to do | What you must end up holding |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Find the email with the delivery date | the email file, a screenshot |
| 2 | Calculate the compensation | a figure per day and a total |
| 3 | Draw up the claim | a PDF with the calculation and your bank details |
| 4 | Send it through three channels | a ticket number and a postal tracking number |
| 5 | Confirm nothing and cancel nothing | the order status unchanged |
| 6 | Count ten days | the delivery date from the confirmation |
#### Step 1. Find the email rather than looking at the site
That turned out to matter more than anything else. In my case the dates diverged: the email of 2 August said 7 August, and the order form said the 9th. The site showed first one and then the other as things went along.
The confirmation email arrives at the moment of payment and fixes the terms on which you agreed to buy. A shop can update its site at any moment; the email it cannot, it sits on a mail server.
Save it as a file rather than only as a screenshot: in Gmail that is the three dots in the corner of the message → "Download message". Inside the file are the mail server's technical headers — they confirm the email is genuine and arrived when it arrived.
#### Step 2. Calculate the compensation
When you paid for goods in advance and they were not delivered on time, consumer protection law in most jurisdictions gives you a penalty for each day of delay — often a fixed percentage of the price of the goods. In my case that was 0.5% of the price of the goods per day; check the rate that applies where you are.
It is calculated on the price of the goods themselves, without delivery. In my case:
- Price of the goods: $678
- 0.5% a day: $3.39
- The delay ran from 8 August — the day after the promised date
Important details. The penalty cannot exceed the amount prepaid — that is the ceiling. And it keeps accruing until the day the goods are physically in your hands, rather than until the day the shop promises to bring them.
Mine came to 16 days — from 8 to 23 August inclusive. $54.
#### Step 3. Draw up the claim
A claim is not emotion but a structure of five parts:
1. To whom and from whom — the company's name, your full name, address, telephone, email
2. What happened — the order number, the payment date, the sum, the promised date, the fact of non-delivery
3. What you demand — delivery of the goods and payment of the penalty
4. The calculation — the sum per day, the number of days, the total
5. Where to pay it — your account details, and the deadline: ten days
My claim was assembled by an AI assistant: I described the situation, attached screenshots of the order, and it pulled out the applicable provisions, calculated the sum and produced a finished PDF. That took about twenty minutes instead of a visit to a lawyer.
What to black out before uploading. Before sending the assistant screenshots and documents, cover card and account numbers, identity document details and anything relating to other people — surnames, telephone numbers, addresses. That does not affect the analysis: the assistant needs the dates, the sums and the order number rather than your banking details. Write your own account for the transfer into the finished document yourself, by hand, after it is assembled.
One warning. Check every set of details — addresses, department names, accounts — by hand on the company's site. An assistant may produce a plausible but non-existent address, and then the document goes nowhere. It pulls legal provisions accurately, but contacts have to be verified. In my case the working address was only to be found in the shop's own help section.
#### Step 4. Send it through three channels at once
One channel a shop may not notice. Three it will.
Email. The fastest, and a reply from a corporate address confirms the letter arrived. Even a brush-off saying "not our department" is proof of receipt.
The feedback form on the site. Attach the claim as a PDF file. The system will assign the enquiry a number and keep the attachment on its own servers. In my case that was a number and five attached files. Take a screenshot of the screen with the number immediately after sending.
Registered post — and this turned out to be decisive. It can be sent online without leaving home: many postal services now offer this. You upload the PDF, identify the company by its registration number and the system fills in the registered address itself. Be sure to tick the option for a legally significant electronic confirmation of delivery.
The post office prints your file at its print centre, puts it in an envelope and hands it over against signature. It cost me about $2. The letter went out on 11 August and was delivered on 17 August at 09:38 — and at 09:45 I had an electronic confirmation with the exact time.
That is when the shop started moving.
#### Step 5. Confirm nothing and cancel nothing
While a dispute is running, any action of yours in your account can be read as consent.
- Do not press "Cancel order". Then the refusal counts as your initiative and there is nothing left to demand.
- Do not press "Extend reservation". That may be read as agreement to swap courier delivery for collection, which you did not pay for.
- Do not press "This answer helped" in a ticket until the question is resolved in substance.
And separately on the voice. I was rude to the courier and said I was not at home — and the delivery service recorded that as "the customer refused the order". Between "bring it tomorrow" and "I no longer need this" lies a gulf, but on the phone it is invisible, and you have no recording of the conversation. So anything you want on the record must be written rather than said.
If you have already been rude — do not panic. A sharp tone does not cancel a contract or deprive you of goods you paid for. Just move into writing from then on.
#### Step 6. Count ten days
From the date the claim is delivered the company has ten days to meet your demands voluntarily. The count starts the day after delivery — and that is what the confirmation with the exact time is for: mine says 17 August, 09:38, and there is nothing to argue about.
If nothing has happened in ten days, the next steps are a complaint to the consumer protection authority and a court claim. Consumer protection claims are usually filed without a court fee, and in many places they can be filed electronically.
I did not get that far.
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How the case against the shop ended
22 August — the twelfth day after the claim was sent — the shop rang me. For the first time in two weeks on their own initiative. We agreed a date.
23 August the memory arrived.
Then came a short period of confusion: a support operator closed the ticket on the fact of delivery, as if the demand for compensation had not been in it. I added a separate message to the same enquiry: the goods have been received, the delivery question is closed, but the enquiry contained a demand for compensation for 16 days of delay, and I request a written reply.
The shop agreed to pay the compensation without going to court.
The result: goods received, money for the delay reimbursed, no need to go to court. Total costs: about $2 on registered post.
What actually worked was not clever wording in the claim. What worked was that a document appeared, handed over against signature, with an exact time and a number. From that moment the story stopped being a call from an irritated customer and became a matter with a deadline.
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Common questions
The shop cancelled the order itself. Was it entitled to?
Unilateral withdrawal from an obligation is generally not permitted. If an order is paid for, a seller cannot simply annul it without your agreement. A cancellation you did not initiate is a breach rather than the end of the story.
I told the courier "it is not convenient right now". Does that count as a refusal?
A request to reschedule delivery and a refusal to buy are different things. Withdrawal from a contract has to be expressed and explicit rather than relayed by a courier in a report.
Delivery is outsourced. Can the shop point at the courier company?
It cannot. A seller is answerable for the acts of those it engages to perform. For you the courier service is the shop's instrument rather than a separate party to the contract.
The goods did arrive in the end. Has the compensation lapsed?
No. A demand for compensation for a past delay lives separately from a demand to deliver the goods. Receiving the goods closes the first and does not cancel the second.
Do I need a lawyer?
For a standard dispute with a shop, no. The claim and the calculation can be assembled yourself, the sending done online, the court claim filed electronically. A live lawyer is needed if the sum matters to you or the dispute is unusual.
How long did it take?
From payment to goods, three weeks. Active effort on my side, about three hours in total, most of it on the first analysis of the situation.
What if there is still silence after ten days?
A complaint to the consumer protection authority and a court claim. Plus a public post: large chains react to mentions on open platforms noticeably faster than to support enquiries.
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The same method for any formal complaint
The story above is about a shop, but the mechanics are the same for anything written to an institution.
A complaint to a building management company — no heating, no cleaning, no response to requests. The same three parts: what happened, what it breaches, what you demand and by when.
A complaint to a consumer protection authority — if a seller did not answer a claim. What matters there is not emotion but a list of the provisions breached.
A letter to a bank — a debit you did not make, insurance you did not ask for, a fee outside the tariff.
A complaint to a telecoms or internet provider — the wrong speed, the wrong charge, a service not provided.
A letter to an employer — delayed payment, refused leave, documents not issued.
And what unites all five. A complaint works not when it is emotional but when it contains four things: what happened, with dates; which rule was breached; what you demand; and by when you expect a reply. Without the last point nobody hurries to answer.
What to give the assistant at the start. Describe the situation in your own words — as you would tell an acquaintance. Who, what, when, what supports it, what you want. It will then find the provisions, calculate the deadlines and assemble the document in the right form.
What not to do. Do not start with "write me a complaint" and no details — you will get a template that thousands of people send and that gets a form reply.
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What to do if the shop does not respond
The claim, the calculation and the analysis of the situation in this story were assembled by an AI assistant — not a general-purpose chat but one configured for legal tasks. It pulled out the applicable provisions, calculated the sum for each day and assembled a document that only had to be printed and signed.
We have thirteen legal assistants on the platform, sorted by subject — which noticeably changes the answer:
- Paralegal — the general case, when it is unclear what the situation falls under
- Personal injury lawyer — compensation for harm to health, life and property
- Property lawyer — transactions, leases, mortgages
- Employment lawyer — disputes with an employer
- Tax lawyer, Corporate lawyer, Family lawyer, Probate lawyer and others
The principle everywhere is the one used here: you describe the situation in human language and get an analysis with the provisions and a finished document rather than a list of references to a code. It opens with a link, and the question is asked in ordinary words.
The catalogue holds over a hundred assistants for various tasks, but there is no need to start with the catalogue — start with one piece of paper of your own.
Three days free, cancel at any time. Take any document you have long been unable to make sense of and work through it in ten minutes.
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*This article describes the author's personal experience and the provisions the claim was built on. It is not legal advice. Where the sum in dispute is significant, it makes sense to show the documents to a practising lawyer.*
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What to read next
[How to make sense of a contract before signing it](/en/blog/understand-a-contract) — the same logic, but before signing rather than after.
[AI for lawyers](/en/blog/ai-for-lawyer) — if you deal with paperwork daily rather than once a year.
[Where does what I write to an AI go](/en/blog/is-it-safe-to-use-ai) — what can be uploaded into a chat and what cannot.
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