Getting Your Money Back

Your package is mailed out and they told you it would be there by a specific time -- guaranteed! How do you know if it actually arrived on time? Depending on the service, a late delivery could refund part or all of your shipping cost.

For mail centers with a high volume of overnight deliveries, there are services that will track deliveries for you and help you obtain refunds. OnTimeAudit will track up to 200 packages a day for $99 a year or $9.95 a month. OnTimeAudit claims that if you ship five packages a day, you can get $1,300 in refunds every year! The service uses your shipping database to find out when your packages were scheduled to be delivered and compares it to when they actually arrived at their destinations. You check your reports online to see what shipments were late, the refund amounts and detailed information on delayed or undeliverable shipments. You print out this report and submit it directly to FedEx or UPS. OnTimeAudit only covers these two carriers that ship 75% of all express packages, but it may soon add others.

To use this service, you need to have shipping software from FedEx or UPS installed on your computer, plus OneTimeAudit's own software, downloaded from its Web site. And, of course, you need internet access.