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Card class: Hero • Category: Shipping & Courier

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At a glance

Live count of DPD claims currently open (filed but not settled or denied). Open claims = trapped cash, unfulfilled customer expectations, and an ageing backlog if not chased. Real-time view, refreshed every webhook from MyDPD’s Claims API.
What it countsCOUNT(claims WHERE status IN ['open', 'under_review', 'awaiting_evidence']). A claim moves to closed-settled (DPD pays) or closed-denied (DPD rejects) when resolved.
Claim trigger semanticsMost claims are merchant-initiated against a parcel that was lost, damaged, or delivered to the wrong address. Some are auto-generated by DPD when its system detects a 14-day no-scan condition (lost-in-network). Customer-facing claims do not exist in DPD’s flow; the merchant is the claimant.
Service-level scopeAll DPD services pooled (Next Day, EU Classic, Saturday). DPDLocal claims surface on the DPDLocal connector card.
Predict-slot quirkSlot misses do not generate claims (the parcel arrived). They generate refund-the-shipping-fee CS tickets which are tracked elsewhere.
Returns / RTORTO parcels typically do not generate claims (customer refused or unavailable, not a carrier failure). A small minority do (RTO due to driver error).
Tracking event semanticsDPD posts a webhook on every claim status change. The card consumes the live count; closed-settled and closed-denied flip the row out of the open count immediately.
Geographic scopeUK domestic + DPD UK outbound. EU sister-carrier claims (DPD France, DPD Germany) flow through their own connectors.
CurrencyGBP for UK domestic claims, native currency (EUR for EU outbound) for cross-border. The card displays raw values; the Claim Value card sums in GBP using daily FX.
Peak-period degradationQ4 typically lifts open-claim count by 2 to 3x because exception count rises ~2 weeks earlier; the lag is consistent. November exceptions feed early-December claim filings.
Auto-resolution lagDPD’s claim-handling SLA is 7 to 21 working days. Claims older than 21 days have likely stalled (waiting on evidence) and need merchant nudge.
Time windowRT (real-time, updates on every webhook)
Alert trigger>0 unresolved >7d (any single claim open more than 7 days trips the alert)
Rolesowner, operations, finance

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your DPD data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A UK premium-DTC fashion brand (AOV £160, ~12,000 parcels / month). Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 12 Mar 26.
Claim statusCountAggregate value (GBP)
Open <7 days14£2,180
Open 7 to 14 days8£1,420
Open 14 to 21 days4£680
Open >21 days (stalled)2£340
All open (this card)28£4,620
The card reads 28. Five things to notice:
  1. The >0 unresolved >7d alert is tripped, 14 claims sit in the 7+ days bucket. This is normal for a 12k-parcel-a-month account; DPD’s SLA is 7 to 21 working days, so a backlog this size is expected. The actionable subset is the 4 in 14 to 21 days (likely waiting on customer evidence) and the 2 over 21 days (definitely stalled).
  2. The 28 corresponds to ~0.23% of monthly parcel volume. Industry benchmark for premium-DTC on DPD UK is ~0.15 to 0.30%. This brand sits at the high end of normal; not a network problem but worth tracking for trend.
  3. The £4,620 trapped is real cash. At 21-day stall rate of ~7%, expect ~£325 to be permanently denied. DPD typically settles 75 to 85% of legitimate claims; the rest are denied for evidence gaps (no POD photo dispute, no signed declaration of non-receipt).
  4. Cross-reference with Exception Rate. This brand’s exception rate was 1.58% on the 30D window. Of the 189 exceptions in that count, ~28 became claims (15% claim-conversion rate, typical for premium DTC). The remainder either resolved with the customer (refund-and-resend) or were absorbed.
  5. 2 claims over 21 days are the urgent action. Pull these from MyDPD, escalate to the DPD account manager, and force resolution. Each day past 21 lowers the settle-rate ~2 pp; a 30-day-old claim is roughly 50/50 to be denied.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Open claims is the cash-trapped real-time signal. Pair it with these to see what is driving the backlog and what it costs.
CardWhy pair it with Open ClaimsWhat the combination tells you
Claim Value (open)Monetary counterpart. Count is volume, value is cash exposure.High count + low value = many small parcels lost (likely accessory SKUs); low count + high value = a few big losses (premium SKUs or wholesale parcels).
Exception RateUpstream cause. Claims lag exceptions by ~14 days.Today’s exceptions predict next-fortnight claim filings.
Failed DeliveriesSubset of claim sources. Failed deliveries (3 attempts then RTO) sometimes generate claims if RTO was driver-error.Most failed deliveries do not become claims; useful as ratio check.
Returned to SenderAdjacent. RTO parcels that were genuinely lost-in-RTO may become claims.Diverging trends mean RTO outcomes are shifting.
On-Time Delivery RateDownstream signal. Persistently low OTD predicts rising claims.If OTD has been low for 4 weeks but claims are flat, the customer base is more forgiving than expected (or merchant is absorbing without filing).
Cross-connector: shopify.refund_rateOperational sibling. A claim resolves with cash from DPD; a refund resolves with cash to the customer.If refunds rise faster than claims, the merchant is eating shipping-failure cost without recovering from DPD.
Cross-connector: jira.open_ticketsCS tracking. Each claim usually has a Jira ticket.The DPDLocal cross-channel card “Open Claims Without Jira Ticket” makes this gap explicit.
Cross-connector: bigcommerce.refund_rateSame as Shopify above.Same caveat.

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in DPD’s own dashboard: MyDPD Business portal -> Claims -> Open Claims, with toggles for status, age, and depot. The closest like-for-like view is All Open, All Statuses, All Ages. Per-claim audit at Claims -> [claim ID] with the full evidence trail and DPD-side notes. Why our number may legitimately differ from MyDPD’s portal:
ReasonDirectionWhy
Time zoneBoundary days offMyDPD defaults to Europe/London. The card uses UTC. Boundary cases (claim filed late evening UK time) can shift the day.
Tracking-feed lagOurs lower for last 30 minutesClaim status webhooks land within seconds in normal conditions but can lag during peak. Most-recent-15-minutes counts may differ slightly.
Peak-period throttlingOurs lower during BFCMClaim API rate-limits engage during peak; status updates can post 1 to 4 hours late. T-1 days reconcile.
Predict-slot vs deliveredEitherMyDPD does not surface slot-related complaints as claims (correctly). Some merchants confuse refund-the-shipping-fee tickets (shown elsewhere) with claims (shown here).
In-review vs awaiting-evidenceEitherDPD has 4 sub-states inside “open” (open, under_review, awaiting_evidence, escalated). The card pools them; MyDPD has separate tabs. The aggregate count matches; per-tab does not.
Cross-connector reconciliation against commerce platform unfulfilled:
CardExpected relationshipWhat causes legitimate divergence
shopify.refund_rateSibling cash-flow signal. Claims recover cash from DPD; refunds spend cash to customer.If refunds run high but claims run low, the merchant is absorbing without filing. Worth cleaning up.
jira.open_ticketsCS workload pairing.If claims rise faster than tickets, customers are filing direct with DPD rather than via CS, signals a CS-process gap.
Cross-3PL: shipbob.sb_otd_rateDifferent population entirely.Do not arithmetically reconcile.

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

DPD vs DPDLocal claim handling, is one easier to file? Both ride the same DPD Group claims process and the same MyDPD-portal Claims interface, so file-time experience is identical. The differences are at the SLA: DPD has a contracted 7 to 21 working-day claim SLA on premium accounts; DPDLocal SLAs vary (typically 10 to 28 days). Settle-rate is also slightly higher on DPD (~80%) vs DPDLocal (~75%) because DPD account managers escalate borderline claims. For high-value parcels, DPD is materially better at recovery; for low-value parcels (<£20) the difference is small. How is in-slot delivery measured, and does an out-of-slot generate a claim? No. Slot misses are not claims. The parcel arrived; the customer paid for a 1-hour or 30-minute window and got it outside that window. The remedy is a refund-of-the-£4.95-slot-fee, processed by the merchant’s CS team, not via DPD’s claims system. Track the volume on Predict Slot Accuracy and the resulting CS tickets on Jira. How does DPD’s predict-app integration affect claim filings? The DPD app sends customers POD photos automatically, which dramatically reduces “delivered to wrong door” disputes (the most common false-positive claim). App-using customer bases generate ~30% fewer claims of this type. The app does not affect lost-in-transit or damaged-in-transit claims, which depend on network conditions, not customer-side visibility. Why is the count rising during peak even though DPD’s network is stable? Lag from exceptions. Open claims rise ~14 days after exception rate rises. November exceptions (Black Friday volume) feed early-December claim filings; the open-claim count can spike weeks into January even though the network has recovered. Read this card with Exception Rate on a 14-day-shifted basis during and after peak. The customer says “DPD said delivered but parcel didn’t arrive”. Should I file a claim? Yes, immediately. This is the classic false-positive-delivery case. File within 14 days of the alleged delivery date (DPD’s hard cutoff), attach the customer’s signed declaration of non-receipt, and request the POD photo from MyDPD. If the photo shows a door that does not match the customer’s address, you will settle in 7 to 14 days. If the photo matches and the customer still claims non-receipt, DPD usually denies; consider a goodwill resend instead. Why are some claims still open more than 21 days? Three usual reasons. (1) Awaiting evidence, DPD asked for the customer’s declaration or proof-of-value invoice and the merchant has not uploaded it yet. (2) Disputed POD, DPD’s POD photo matches the address; the merchant disputes; the case is escalated. (3) High-value review, claims over £500 typically go to a manual reviewer at DPD HQ and add 5 to 10 days. Pull the >21-day cohort from MyDPD, work each case individually; do not let them age further. What is the returns flow and what does it have to do with claims? DPD returns ride either DPD’s “Inbound Consumer Returns” service or a manual courier return. Most returns do not generate claims (the parcel was returned cleanly). A small subset (<2% of returns) become claims if the return parcel itself was damaged or lost in transit, treated as a fresh outbound for claim purposes. Track on Returned to Sender. Why is today’s count high but the trend looks fine? Real-time spikes are usually filing batches; many merchants file claims weekly in a Friday batch. The spike on Friday afternoon is normal, watch the rolling 7-day count. Nothing acute should be flagged based on a single hour’s reading. Multi-shipper strategy, when does DPD’s claim-recovery rate justify the premium? Across a typical premium-DTC mix, DPD’s higher settle rate (~80% vs ~50% on Evri) recovers ~£0.80 per £1 of claim value compared with ~£0.50. For a 12,000-parcel-a-month brand at AOV £160 with 1.5% exception rate (180 exceptions, ~30 claims per month, ~£5,000 claim value), the difference is ~£1,500 per month in recovered cash on DPD vs Evri. That is roughly £18,000 per year, materially offsetting the £2-per-parcel premium at this volume. The maths breaks down at low AOV (<£40) where claim values are small and recovery rates matter less.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Open Claims is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across DPD and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.