What you can prove about a delivery depends entirely on who carried it. A same-day courier gives you a photo, coordinates and often a signature. UPS gives you a signature and no photo. USPS gives you a scan. Getcho reads whatever the carrier actually returns, checks it against the order, and fixes what does not line up before the evidence hardens against you.
What Is Proof of Delivery?
Proof of delivery is the evidence that an order reached the right place. What that evidence actually consists of is not standard, and the gap between carriers is much wider than most merchants realise.
A same-day courier typically returns a photo, GPS coordinates and often a signature. FedEx returns photos and coordinates if you are on the right visibility product. UPS returns a signature image in the API but no delivery photo and no coordinates. USPS returns a scan and will email a proof-of-delivery letter. Same two words, four completely different amounts of proof.
Getcho reads whatever a carrier returns, checks it against the order, and acts on the mismatches. Where there is a photo, it is scored against the address, the drop instructions, prior deliveries to that building and where the driver actually stood. Where there is no photo, the check runs on what does exist — coordinates, timing, driver notes, whether the recipient was engaging with the tracking link. Thin evidence is still evidence.
What you actually get back
Straight from each carrier's own API documentation. Worth knowing before you decide who carries what.
| Carrier | Delivery photo | GPS at delivery | Signature image |
|---|---|---|---|
| Same-day couriers | Usually, plus pickup photo | Yes | Often |
| Regional carriers | Yes, sometimes several | Mostly | Varies |
| FedEx | On Advanced Integrated Visibility | Same product | Yes, via SPOD |
| UPS | Not on business accounts | No | Yes, in the API body |
| USPS | No | No | Emailed letter only |
| DHL | No | No | Link, with a postcode challenge |
This is not a ranking. It is a practical constraint. If a carrier returns no photo and no coordinates, then when a customer says the parcel never arrived you have a scan and an argument, and the scan always wins.
Which is why it belongs in the routing decision. A $40 order on a carrier with thin evidence is a fine trade. A $600 one is a bet that nothing goes wrong, and you are the one covering it if it does.
Why the timing matters
Read the claims terms across the last-mile carriers and the same clause keeps appearing: a misdelivery claim is denied where a proof-of-delivery photo exists, and theft after that photo was taken is not claimable at all. The photo is treated as settling the matter, whatever it shows.
So the window is not days. It is the few minutes while the driver is still on the street and the package can still be moved. After that you are not filing a claim, you are absorbing a loss and calling it a refund.
The deadlines do not help either. Filing windows run from 15 days on some carriers to nine months on others, several require a waiting period before an order can even be declared lost, and default coverage is commonly capped at $100 regardless of what was in the box.
How the check works
Each delivery gets a score. Under 6 escalates by default — you can move the threshold, and it varies by what triggered the flag. These are the signals that carry the most weight when a photo exists; there are others, and more still when there is no photo at all.
Does the doorway in the photo match where this order was going? A bag photographed at unit 2H when the drop notes say 6H is a mismatch, not a delivery.
"Leave at the front desk" and a photo of an empty stoop do not agree. Neither does a signature-required order left unattended.
Addresses have history. If nine drivers have left packages inside the lobby and the tenth left one on the pavement, that is worth catching.
Coordinates at the moment of the photo, against the delivery address. Distance is the tell that separates a neighbour's porch from the right one.
What happens next
A flag is not a report you read in the morning. Our AI contacts the driver directly — by message or by voice call, in their own language — with the correction. Most of the time that ends with the driver walking the package to the right unit before the customer has noticed anything.
The same applies at pickup. If a driver collects a bag labelled for a different business, or from the wrong street number, it is caught before they set off rather than after the wrong customer opens the box.
When an order genuinely cannot be recovered, the claim is filed with the evidence already attached — photo, coordinates, timeline, and the driver exchange. Getcho can file it for you and you track the status, or we hand you the evidence pack and you file it yourself.
And when a customer says they never received an order, they can be sent the delivery photo and the driver's last-known location straight away. A great many of those reports end with the customer finding the package by the side door, with a neighbour, or in the lobby. No refund, no claim, no lost sale.
Works with what you already use
Delivery Forensics runs standalone on deliveries you dispatch elsewhere — USPS, UPS, UniUni and other regional and national carriers. Keep your existing setup and add the evidence layer on top of it.
It matters most where the evidence is thinnest, which is not always where you would expect. Several regional carriers return more usable proof than the national ones do — photos, coordinates, sometimes multiple images per drop. The problem there is rarely a lack of data. It is that nobody is reading it.
Parsel, a multi-carrier shipping platform, saw claims on gig deliveries fall from roughly 30% of orders to almost none after integrating with Getcho — with the same driver pools, monitored. They wrote about it on their own blog.
Read the case files
Delivery Forensics is also a series. Each post reconstructs one real delivery failure from the evidence — what the photo showed, what the coordinates said, what the root cause turned out to be, and the workflow that stops it happening again. They are written to be useful whether or not you ever become a customer.
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By Evandro Nadal, COO, Getcho · Last updated: