A failed delivery attempt starts a clock. Here's how long you have

Nobody was in. The parcel is fine, the customer is unbothered, and in a fortnight it will be back in your stockroom at your expense — unless somebody acts.

Last updated September 2026

The short answer

A failed delivery attempt is not a failure. It is the start of a countdown that ends with the parcel back at your door, and the only person likely to notice the countdown is you.

The customer does not experience urgency: from their side, a parcel is somewhere and will presumably turn up. The carrier does not chase them beyond the automatic card or notification. So the window closes quietly, and the first hard evidence most merchants get is a return arriving weeks later.

The shape of the window

Across the French Colissimo parcels we followed end to end, the sequence was consistent:

Stage	What is happening	Can you still act?
Attempt fails	Nobody available at the address. The carrier will usually try again on its own.	Yes — easily. A message now can fix the address or arrange a time.
Moved to a pickup point	The parcel stops being delivered to and starts waiting to be collected.	Yes — but only the customer can complete it. They have to physically go.
Holding period expires	Colissimo held these for 15 calendar days from arrival at the point.	Barely. The last day or two is a phone call, not an email.
Return to sender	The parcel is travelling back to you.	No. You are now handling a refund or a reship.

Why the second attempt matters more than the first

The first failure is ordinary. Somebody was at work. Most carriers retry the next working day without being asked, and the majority of these resolve themselves with nobody doing anything.

The second failure is different in kind, because the automatic retry has now been spent. In the parcels we watched, what followed a second failure was not a third attempt — it was a move to a pickup point. That is the moment the parcel changes category:

• Before: the carrier is trying to deliver it. Time is on your side.
• After: the parcel is stationary and waiting for the customer to travel to it. Time is now against you, on a fixed deadline, and the only person who can act is someone with no sense of urgency.

Read the words, not a counter

It is tempting to track this by counting attempts. We tried, and stopped, for a reason worth passing on: carrier tracking data does not reliably count attempts.

What a carrier publishes for each scan is the parcel's current state, not a description of what just happened. Once a parcel is in a failed-delivery state, later scans can keep carrying that state while the parcel is simply being moved around a depot. Counting those gives you a number that grows with how often the carrier scanned, not with how many times somebody knocked on a door.

So read the wording of the events instead, and watch the clock. "Nous sommes passés mais nous n'avons pu vous remettre votre colis" is an attempt. "Votre colis a été déposé dans un point postal" is the parcel arriving at a pickup point — and that is the event that starts the deadline that costs you money.

What to send, and when

The useful message is the one that arrives while the parcel is still collectable, and that says where and until when.

Notice that the second message does not state a deadline. We do not know the specific one for every carrier and route, and a date invented for a customer is worse than no date: they plan around it, and then find the parcel gone.

What it costs to miss the window

A returned parcel is not a neutral event. You pay the outbound carriage you already paid, the return carriage, the handling to get the item back into stock, and — often — a refund and a second shipment on top. Against that, a message sent on day two costs nothing.

That asymmetry is the whole argument for treating a failed attempt as urgent even though nothing appears to be wrong. Nothing is wrong yet. That is precisely the window.