It is with regret that you are reading this Missing Parcels & Undelivered Parcels FAQ.
However, on the bright side, only a couple of Wild As The Wind parcels have ever been completely lost. So, with all the advice and insights provided here, along with a little timely assistance from you, your missing parcel will hopefully be located very soon.
What’s In This Article?
This article lists all the reasons you may not have received your parcel… yet!
It also lists what needs to be done, and by whom. Please simply follow the advice given for a speedy resolution of the situation.
These two important sections are listed at the end of this long article. Please use these links to access them easily:
What To Do When Your Parcel Goes Missing?
Read This FAQ Before Contacting Wild As The Wind
It is important that you read this Missing Parcel FAQ before contacting Wild As The Wind directly. It will save you a lot of time and effort, and will hopefully avert a lot of frustration, also.
The advice given here has quickly resolved the issues relating to the small number of parcels that go missing, often without the need for contacting the Royal Mail directly, or even Wild As The Wind.
Wild As The Wind is dedicated to updating delivery information with every new insight obtained. This is being done to ensure that resolution remains as simple and straightforward as possible for you.
The time spent recording all of this information for you, will hopefully save you time and anguish on your side.
However, if contacting Wild As The Wind is necessary, please ensure you confirm what actions you have taken to eliminate potential issues, so that identifying the problem is a lot more possible at our end.
Every instance of a missing parcel has required a process of elimination to determine what the problem has been. A lot of time will be saved on both sides if you explain what steps you have taken to clarify the issue when contacting Wild As The Wind.
This article tells you what you can do prior to contacting Wild As The Wind, and what information is needed from you if contacting Wild As The Wind cannot be avoided.
Why Is Your Parcel Delayed?
Your parcel may have been delayed for a number of reasons, so please read all the advice provided, and act where necessary.
The reasons range from wrongly addressed parcels, owing to typing errors when placing your order, down to a failure to deliver because your postal delivery person is off sick, and there’s no-one to replace them.
The only way to figure out what might be causing the delay of your parcel is to go methodically through all the possibilities, step by step.
Reverse Engineering What Might Have Happened…
Did your order get processed correctly? Did you receive an Order Confirmation Email after placing your order?
The first thing to check is your order confirmation email, to make sure your order was completed and registered in the sales log at our end.
An order confirmation email is automatically generated the moment you place your order. It’s one of the key reasons you are asked to provide your email address as part of the order process.
If you didn’t receive confirmation of your Wild As The Wind order within minutes of buying your items on the Wild As The Wind Shop website, there may be a number of reasons for this…
- There is a possibility your order was not completed properly. It is important for you to locate your order confirmation so you can be 100% sure your order was placed in its entirety. ***If you haven’t seen your order confirmation email in your inbox, even though you completed your order correctly, it’ll likely be in your spam folder. Please check your spam folder for this reason.
- If you are ordering for the first time, there’s a greater chance your email account will not recognise confirmation emails from Wild As The Wind. ***This is why your email software may have placed your Wild As The Wind order confirmation email in your spam folder.
- You may have given an incorrect email address with your order. Or, you may have given a secondary email address with your order.
Actions required:
Please check all of your email accounts for your Wild As The Wind order confirmation, looking in both your inbox and spam folders.
Please add the Wild As The Wind email address to your email address book to avoid this issue in future.
If your order confirmation is nowhere to be found this may mean that your order has not been processed properly. Please read Why Did My Order Fail? for more information.
In a very small number of cases there maybe another reason why you didn’t receive an order confirmation email. Please read Order Confirmation & Confirmation Of Posting if this is the case.
Did you receive a Confirmation Of Posting email?
Wild As The Wind always send out confirmation of posting emails, (known as ‘completed order’ confirmations), using the same Wild As The Wind email address used to send you your order confirmation email.
If you don’t receive your confirmation of posting email within five working days, then please check your spam folder and add the Wild As The Wind email address to your email address book to avoid this issue in future.
More information: Order Confirmation & Confirmation Of Posting
Please get in touch if you haven’t received your confirmation of posting email after five days. But, before doing so, it is important that you read the information relating to Delivery Timescales and Royal Mail Proof Of Posting directly below.
And, please remember, when contacting Wild As The Wind, it is important that you confirm that you have received an order confirmation email, but you have not yet received your confirmation of posting email.
This will provide us with the ability to quickly identify what the issues may be.
Delivery Timescales
Wild As The Wind use the Royal Mail second class post for all of our deliveries, as this provides the following:
- Proof of posting
- Means of tracking your parcel
- It keeps costs down for you
- You don’t have to be in when your parcel is delivered, which means you can avoid collecting your parcel from your sorting office
Please allow 5 working days for your confirmation of posting email to arrive.
Also, please allow a minimum of 10 working days for your parcel to arrive before considering contacting Wild As The Wind directly about a missing / delayed parcel.
However, during exceptional circumstances, such as Christmas, (when high postal volumes occur), or during lockdowns or periods of elevated illness, please allow up to 14 days for your parcel to arrive, before contacting Wild As The Wind.
Please consult Deliveries & Returns for more information.
Royal Mail Proof Of Posting
The Royal Mail issues Wild As The Wind with a proof of posting receipt for each parcel. This proof of posting receipt records the individual tracking number assigned to each parcel.
You are not issued with the 16 digit tracking number within your confirmation of posting email.
Because Wild As The Wind post a good number of parcels each week, and because so few go missing, it would be a criminal waste of time to manually type in all the individual tracking numbers for each parcel within the confirmation of posting emails.
However, this information is retained and will be provided to you after you have done what you can to figure out why your parcel may have gone awry. This is simply done by following the advice within this article.
Confirmation Emails Are All Good, But Your Parcel Is Still Missing
There are a few other issues affecting the situation with regards missing parcels.
For example, sometimes wrongly addressed parcels, or parcels with an incomplete address, are dispatched.
However, if there is an apparent mistake in the address provided with your order, Wild As The Wind will contact you, asking you to verify your address. (We believe it’s better to be safe rather than sorry, and whilst time-consuming, it allows us to post all items out with greater confidence.)
Nevertheless, these measures are not fail-safe. This means that some incorrectly addressed parcels slip through the net… And, on other occasions, it’s a question of your postal delivery person getting ‘inventive’ when it comes to delivering your parcel…
For this reason, it’s important for you to make best efforts to find your parcel, or figure out why it may have gone awry, before contacting Wild As The Wind.
Please follow the steps you need to take at the end of this article. And, please continue reading if your confirmation emails are all in order…
Only you will know whether you have addressed your parcel correctly, and only you can check with your neighbours, and in outbuildings or porches etc, so please establish the facts before contacting Wild As The Wind.
This is simply done by following the instructions in the What To Do When Your Parcel Goes Missing? section at the end of this page… But first, it’s important for you to read about all of the reasons WHY parcels go missing so that you can begin to unravel what might have happened…
Please skip the sections which don’t apply to your situation.
Why Do Parcels Go Missing?
There are a number of reasons why parcels can go missing. These are explained in the following sections with the following headings:
- Parcel Has Been Delivered But Can’t Be Found
- Improperly Addressed Orders
- Delivery Attempted But No-one Was In
- Collecting Your Parcel From The Sorting Office
- What Happens If I Ignore The Request To Collect From The Sorting Office?
- Deliveries To Business / Organisational Addresses Are Improperly Processed Internally
- Exceptional Circumstances
- What To Do When Your Parcel Goes Missing?
- How To Avoid Returned Parcels
Parcel Has Been Delivered But Can’t Be Found
Royal Mail Postal workers will do everything within their power to deliver your package safely. However, if there is no-one at home, and your letter box is too small for the package to fit through, this will potentially present a situation where the parcel cannot be delivered directly to you.
The alternatives available to your postal worker are:
- Leave the package in a safe place (porch or outbuilding etc)
- Leave with a neighbour
If you have a communal porch where leaving the parcel will present the risk of theft, or there are no other safe places to leave your package, then your postal delivery person will resort to leaving your parcel with one of your neighbours. If none of your neighbours are at home your parcel will be returned to the Royal Mail Sorting Office.
In these instances your postal delivery person will always post a card explaining what they have done with your package.
If they have left your package in a safe place the card will describe which safe place they have used so you can easily locate your parcel. Or, the card will explain which neighbour they have left your parcel with.
Please check your safe posting place for your parcel by following the advice on the card. Or, ask your neighbours.
If you still can’t find your parcel please either discuss this with your postal delivery person, or contact your local sorting office to pursue the matter further.
Regretably, once the parcel has be marked as delivered there is nothing that Wild As The Wind can do. A successful delivery means that it is out of our hands. But, hopefully a quick chat with your postal delivery person, or your local sorting office, will resolve everything for you.
Improperly Addressed Orders
It is vitally important for you to give your full address when placing an order. Wild As The Wind cannot be held responsible for your failure to provide a full and accurate address with your order. So, please double check that the address you give with your order is the right one.
****If you realise the address provided is incorrect or incomplete it is imperative to either message or email Wild As The Wind to explain, and to provide the correct address. This must be done immediately!
Best efforts will be made to use any alternative address provided, but no guarantee can be given. This is because the administration of orders is already very complicated. Therefore, receiving entirely separate instructions, via an entirely different system, will inevitably mean that alterations cannot feasibly be made in all cases.
Issues of timing will prevent the correction of some customer mistakes, but, because there is no efficient method of relaying new information from one system to another, this means that, despite best efforts, not all mistakes made by customers at the time of ordering can be rectified.
Regrettably, if your order is sent to the address provided with the order, even after you have sent a message or email to advise Wild As The Wind you wish the order to be sent elsewhere, we regret that the liability for the whereabouts of the parcel rests with you for not having provided the correct address at the outset.
Mistakes, for which you are responsible, which result in Wild As The Wind spending a considerable amount of time trying to resolve, will sometimes result in a Admin Charge being applied, which you will have to pay before resolution will be provided.
Delivery Attempted But No-one Was In
Royal Mail Postal workers will do everything in their power to deliver your package safely. However, if there is no-one at home, and your letter box is too small for the package to fit through, this will potentially present a situation where the parcel cannot be delivered.
The alternatives available to them are:
- Leave the package in a safe place (porch or outbuilding etc)
- Leave with a neighbour
If you have a communal porch where leaving the parcel will present the risk of theft, or there are no other safe places to leave your package, then your postal delivery person will resort to leaving your parcel with your neighbours. If none of your neighbours are at home your parcel will be returned to the Royal Mail Sorting Office.
In these instances your postal delivery person will always post a card explaining what they have done with your package.
If they have left your package in a safe place the card will describe which safe place they have used so you can easily locate your parcel. Or, the card will explain which neighbour they have left your parcel with, or that they have had to take your package back to the sorting office.
If they have had to take your package back to the sorting office the card will advise you what course of action is required by you. There are usually only two courses of action stipulated.
- The first is that they will attempt to deliver your package on a future date and no action is to be taken by you.
- Or, they will request you to collect the parcel from the sorting office yourself.
Collecting Your Parcel From The Sorting Office
If your postal delivery person has tried and failed to deliver your parcel a couple of times, and there are no suitable safe places to leave your package, it will be taken back to the sorting office so that you may safely collect it.
A card explaining what you need to do will be posted through your letter box advising you of the action required.
Every effort will have been made to deliver your parcel within the delivery timescale, but, if you are not in and your post box is too small for small packages, and there are no safe places to leave your parcel, then your postal delivery person is obliged to retain your parcel at the sorting office for you to collect.
What Happens If I Ignore The Request To Collect My Parcel From The Sorting Office?
Please read all of the information in this section before deciding on your course of action.
Wild As The Wind cannot be held responsible for you failing to read and act accordingly upon the information provided in this section.
In this section:
- Your Position With Regards An Uncollected Parcel From The Sorting Office
- Admin Charges & Postal Charges For Reposting Your Parcel
- Why Are Admin Charges Applied?
- Selecting A New Address For Your Returned Parcel
Your Position With Regards An Uncollected Parcel From The Sorting Office
It is your responsibility to act upon the advice outlined on the postcard delivered to you by your postal delivery person. At this juncture the matter is effectively out of the hands of Wild As The Wind.
Any failure to collect the parcel will result in it being eventually returned to Wild As The Wind… usually within a couple of months.
Your parcel, even when returned to Wild As The Wind, still remains your property, even though Wild As The Wind has the added burden of reprocessing it.
No refunds are awarded to those who fail to collect their parcels from the sorting office, resulting in the parcel being returned to Wild As The Wind. This decision is final, and not negotiable.
In addition, Wild As The Wind will never re-send an item to an address where there has been a failure to deliver in the past. Again, this decision is final, and not negotiable.
Please see Selecting A New Address For Your Returned Parcel, (below), for your options of choosing an alternative address.
Admin Charges & Postal Charges For Reposting Your Parcel
Returned parcels are highly problematical for all concerned. Not only do they significantly increase the risk of damage to the contents, (Wild As The Wind products are almost exclusively packaged in glass bottles), they also waste a lot of time and resources within the Royal Mail, making the process a lot more environmentally unsound, and ultimately ensuring the price of deliveries will increase for everyone in future.
Dealing with returned parcels is also costly for Wild As The Wind. Because of this, the processing of returned parcels will ALWAYS carry an Admin Charge. The Admin Charge, and the cost of reposting, will need to be paid via BACS prior to your parcel being sent out again.
The cost of reposting will minimally equate to the cost of a 2nd class small parcel, or, at the discretion of Wild As The Wind, it may equate to the cost of delivering a parcel that requires a signature. The latter will be more expensive than the former.
As it may take as long as a month, or even two months in some cases, for your parcel to be returned to Wild As The Wind, and because it can take a further two to three weeks to process the returned parcel, the redelivery of your parcel can take up to three months.
In our experience, the return of an uncollected parcel takes a minimum of 6 weeks.
The reason it may take up to three weeks for your parcel to be reprocessed by Wild As The Wind is because of the administrative processes involved. After logging the reason for the return, charges need to be calculated, and an invoice raised. The invoice will be delivered to you via email.
Plus, after we have issued you with an email invoice, we have to wait for you to pay the invoice for the Admin Charges and cost of reposting, prior to your parcel being sent out again.
The invoice needs to be paid using a BACS payment via your bank. The invoice will detail the account you will need to make your payment to.
Why Are Admin Charges Applied?
Wild As The Wind is duty bound to ensure all time is used efficiently. The decision to levy Admin Charges has been made to protect the vast majority of Wild As The Wind customers who present no issue to the smooth running of this small artisanal business.
Admin Charges mean that those who negatively impact Wild As The Wind pick up the tab for their actions, instead of the cost being transferred onto those who interact seamlessly with Wild As The Wind, thereby avoiding wasted time.
For more information about why Admin Charges are applied, please refer to Can I Collect In Person?
Selecting A New Address For Your Returned Parcel
You can elect to have the parcel sent to a friend or family member who you trust, and who is going to be at home to receive your parcel.
You cannot elect to have your parcel sent ‘poste restante’ to a participating post office, if you have an address in the area. If you live outside of the UK and wish to use the ‘poste restante’ facility, it is your responsibility to do the following:
- Check to see if the post office you wish to designate for your collection is a participating post office in the poste restante scheme.
- Set up your poste restante with your designated post office, providing email confirmation and proof of this to Wild As The Wind. A failure to do this will result in your parcel not being reprocessed.
You will only have a short window of time within which to pick up your poste restante mail / parcel, so if your travel plans are likely to change, or if you will have difficulty travelling to the designated post office, then your mail / parcel will be disposed of after a reasonably short period of time. It is your responsibility to check how long your parcel can be held by your designated post office, prior to setting up your poste restante.
Please do not set up a post restante arrangement unless you are certain you can collect your parcel in good time from your designated post office.
There is no way for Wild As The Wind to retrieve a parcel that has been sent to a poste restante post office. After being held for just over two weeks or so, the parcel is deemed to have been ‘unclaimed’, and is dispatched to Belfast for disposal.
No refund can be claimed for poste restante parcels that remain unclaimed within the designated time.
Deliveries To Business / Organisational Addresses Are Improperly Processed Internally
If you have chosen to have your order delivered to a business address, this can sometimes cause problems owing to the following:
- Weekend deliveries may go awry if the business isn’t open on Saturdays
- Internal processing of your parcel results in your order ending up in the wrong department
- Your parcel may be stored internally where it’s difficult to find
- No single person is responsible for processing mail internally, and so it’s difficult to reverse-engineer where your parcel has ended up after it has been delivered by a postal delivery person
Delivering orders to business addresses is often a very safe option. However, on the rare occasion this presents a problem, please do the following:
- If you work for a small to medium-sized business, please talk to the people who have taken delivery of post at the business after you received your confirmation of posting / completed order email.
- If you work for a large company, please talk to your receptionist to find out where your order has been allocated
- If there has been any of the issues mentioned above, your postal delivery person will have left a card explaining what they have done. Please ask if a card like this has been left for you.
If your parcel is still missing, after thoroughly researching what could have happened internally, please notify Wild As the Wind of your missing parcel.
What To Do When Your Parcel Goes Missing?
- Firstly, check your porch and any out buildings, (garage, shed, stables and barns etc), to see if your parcel has been ‘left in a safe place’. Most parcels don’t fit through the average letterbox, and this is why your postal delivery person may leave your parcel in a safe place.
- Check with neighbours.
- Check your junk mail / recycling to see if a postcard from your postal delivery person is hiding amongst the unsolicited mail.
- Communicate with your postal delivery person. You can do this easily by leaving a note for them on your letterbox, or intercepting them on the doorstep. You can also ring your local sorting office to discuss a missing delivery, and leave a message for your postal delivery person, alerting them to the issue of your missing parcel. Please DO NOT contact Wild As The Wind about a missing parcel until you have communicated with your postal delivery person.
- If your parcel is still missing, the next step is to check to see if you addressed your parcel correctly. If you mistype one character in your postcode, this will result in your parcel being delivered to the wrong address. If you have recently moved, you may be more liable to make mistakes with your address.
If your parcel is still nowhere to be seen, and you have addressed your parcel correctly, then please get in touch.
Please remember to tell us all the steps you have taken to locate your parcel, or establish why it may have gone missing. Thank you. x
Contact Wild As The Wind via email by clicking the link immediately below.
For more ways to contact Wild As The Wind please go to How Do I Contact Wild As The Wind?
How To Avoid Returned Parcels
- Always address your order accurately with your full address
- If you know you will be out when your parcel will be delivered, leave a note for your postie telling them where to leave your parcel
- Prearrange your preferred ‘safe place’ for leaving postal items which will not fit through your letterbox in person with your postal delivery person so you don’t need to leave a note on your door, which could alert thieves where to find your latest purchases
- Read and act on postcards from your postal delivery person
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