A single disruption like one stolen package, one damaged shipment, or one claim left unresolved can cost a brand far more than the value of the goods lost. It costs a customer.
62% of online shoppers1 feel anxious while waiting for a package to arrive, with many checking tracking information up to eight times a day, and that anxiety is well-founded. 1 in 4 Americans have had a package stolen at least once, and package theft cost consumers more than$37 billion in 2025 alone.2 Retailers absorbed $22 billion of that in returns, refunds, and replacements.2
These numbers tell two stories at once: what customers lose, and what brands absorb. The 25% who have had a package stolen are watching to see how you respond. The other 75% will be too, when their turn comes. The financial hit is only half the damage. A poor resolution doesn’t just cost a replacement and a refund; it costs a loyal customer.
Why Most Brands Are Still Getting Resolutions Wrong
Fulfillment conversations in e-commerce are dominated by two variables: speed and cost. How fast does an order ship? What does it cost per unit? Those are legitimate questions, but they only account for what happens inside the warehouse. When a package goes missing, when a box arrives damaged, when a carrier marks something as delivered and nothing is on the porch, the frustration doesn’t land on the carrier, it lands on you. Customers don’t experience your fulfillment infrastructure. They experience your brand.
Tactical fixes like better tracking emails and branded packaging inserts treat the symptom rather than the cause. The only thing that moves the needle is having a clear, fast resolution system in place before anything goes wrong, and signaling to customers at checkout that you've already thought this through.
Stord’s 2025 Mystery Shopping Report found that 85% of consumers would never shop with a brand again after a poor delivery experience. Brands that resolve delivery issues quickly and with minimal friction tend to see customer relationships deepen, because recovering well from a problem demonstrates reliability in a way that a smooth delivery simply cannot.
Stord Shipment Protection is how brands close that gap, not as an insurance product bolted onto the checkout flow, but as a post-purchase experience they want to own.
What Separates a Good Protection Program from a Bad One
Not all protection programs are built the same way, and the differences are felt entirely by the customer. A protection product that routes customers to a third-party claims interface has already failed. One that requires initiating a carrier investigation before a claim can be filed has compounded the problem rather than solved it. These designs treat protection as a financial backstop. What brands need is a resolution system.
The right model addresses three distinct stages of the customer experience.
1. Checkout Configuration
The best programs are built into the purchase flow, not just added on top of it. Configuration should give brands real flexibility, coverage as a required add-on, absorbed as a brand-funded benefit, or offered as an opt-in or opt-out selection. Protection cost is calculated automatically based on cart value, with no manual work for the operations team and no friction added to the purchase flow. Protected orders register automatically in the Order Management System (OMS) the moment they’re placed, keeping fulfillment data clean and centralized from the start.
2. Claims Resolution
When a claim is needed, speed and brand ownership are everything. The process should run through the brand’s own tracking portal, not a third-party interface. Self-service filing that takes seconds and bypasses the customer service queue entirely is a fundamentally different experience from one that routes customers through multiple handoffs. Speed and containment are what make the difference between a customer who comes back and one who doesn’t.
3. Payout and Re-shipment
The financial structure of a protection program determines how quickly a brand can act. Standard carrier liability coverage typically caps at $100 and requires proof of fault,3 a process that can take weeks, with the burden of proof sitting entirely on the brand, not the carrier. Purpose-built protection puts the brand in control from the start. Claims are processed without carrier adjudication, payouts go directly to the brand, and the best programs allow re-shipment before reimbursement is even finalized. No waiting, fault determination, or weeks-long process sitting in a carrier's queue
The difference shows up at every step:
| Standard Carrier Claims | Purpose-Built Protection |
|---|---|---|
Where the customer goes | Third-party carrier portal | Brand’s own tracking portal |
Time to file a claim | 10–15 minutes, multiple steps | Seconds, one self-service step |
Payout trigger | Carrier must be proven at fault | Subject to claim validation, not carrier adjudication |
Payout recipient | Customer (after weeks) | Brand directly |
Re-ship timeline | After reimbursement clears | Before reimbursement is finalized |
Claims visibility | Separate from OMS | Integrated into existing dashboard |
Brand experience | Generic, disconnected | Fully branded, end-to-end |
Stord Shipment Protection is built on these principles. Claims are filed and tracked through a branded order tracking portal, the process is entirely self-service, and all protected order data lives in Stord One Commerce alongside the rest of the fulfillment operation.
That kind of integration matters, but having the right infrastructure is only part of the equation. Most brands have some form of protection in place. Far fewer are asking the right questions about whether it's working.
The Claim Rate Is the Wrong Metric
Most brands evaluate shipment protection against a single variable: how often claims happen. That framing misses most of the financial picture.
The true cost of an unprotected loss event is replacement inventory, re-shipment, customer service time, and the probability that the customer doesn’t return.
For subscription brands and high-consideration product categories, a single poor resolution experience can eliminate the lifetime value of a customer who might otherwise have ordered for years.
Consider a mid-size supplement brand with a $90 average order value where the average customer orders six times per year. When a package is stolen, the lack of a structured resolution system means the brand absorbs the replacement and re-shipment cost, files a carrier claim that takes two to three weeks, and asks the customer to wait. But the customer, who already paid and is now being asked to navigate a claims process, doesn't wait. They dispute the charge, leave a review, and cancel their subscription. That single stolen package just cost the brand $540 in lost annual revenue from a single customer only, and that’s before accounting for re-acquisition cost, which for most DTC brands runs well above the cost of the lost goods themselves.
For a brand processing hundreds of orders a month, even a small percentage of unresolved theft incidents adds up to thousands of dollars in preventable losses, not only from the stolen goods themselves, but also from the customers who never came back.
Now consider the same scenario with protection in place. The customer files a claim in seconds, the brand re-ships the same day, and the subscription continues.
The customer, having experienced a problem handled well, often becomes more loyal than if nothing had gone wrong at all.
The revenue upside is equally significant. Delivery anxiety is a real driver of cart abandonment, particularly on larger orders, and offering protection at checkout directly addresses it. Some programs, including Stord’s Shipment Protection, also include a margin-sharing component where brands participate in a percentage of protection revenue, shifting it from a cost center to a contributing line item.
Good Protection Starts Before the Package Ships
Stord Shipment Protection resolves what goes wrong after delivery. But a protection program is only as effective as the experience surrounding it. A customer who received a vague delivery estimate, got no tracking updates, and then had a package stolen is a harder recovery than one who had clear expectations set from the start. The brands seeing the most value from protection are the ones that have also reduced the conditions under which it needs to activate.
1. Reducing the Conditions That Trigger Claims
When a delivery date is accurate and the order arrives as promised, protection rarely needs to be activated. When something does go wrong, the combination of a credible pre-purchase commitment and a fast post-purchase resolution is the full story a customer carries forward about the brand. That’s why the estimated delivery date is where AI does meaningful work before the protection layer ever needs to engage. Showing customers a precise, reliable date rather than a vague shipping tier sets accurate expectations from the start, and fewer unmet expectations means fewer claims. And the data backs it up. 23% of shoppers abandon their cart when delivery timeframes seem too long or unclear.5
2. Making Protection Work Harder Through Connected Infrastructure
Fragmented tools produce fragmented experiences, and fragmented protection. When the OMS, the tracking portal, the protection program, and the claims workflow share data within the same infrastructure, brands get real visibility into what’s happening, faster resolution when something goes wrong, and cleaner reporting on the patterns that drive claims in the first place. Stord built its Consumer Experience suite around this principle, connecting estimated delivery dates, branded tracking, post-purchase notifications, and shipment protection into a single operational layer. That same infrastructure powers StordAI, a generative assistant that lets operators surface answers to operational questions through natural language, including order delays, inventory availability, SKU performance by region, and reorder timing. Having unified systems means the data behind good customer outcomes and good operational decisions is one and the same.
A Lost Package Well Handled Is a Customer Earned
Customers hold brands to a high standard at every touchpoint, and how a brand responds when something goes wrong is no exception. The brands winning on retention have already internalized this, and they’ve moved the conversation from whether to offer protection to whether their fulfillment is actually good enough to deliver on it.
The brands that build the infrastructure to handle delivery problems well, and signal at checkout that they are prepared to do so, earn a form of trust that smooth deliveries alone never could.
Shipment protection has historically been sold as risk management, something you buy to limit exposure. Today, it is a baseline expectation. The brands that execute it well are the ones customers remember and come back to.
If you want to deliver a post-purchase experience your customers can trust, explore Stord Shipment Protection or reach out. The Stord team is here to help.
