That sucks man, sadly this happens all the time, and I can name tons of businesses that ask for this problem by doing lots of the following:
1) not providing shipping options to the buyer. Even if you get an option of shipping company/level most won't give you the option to add insurance or a signature. Even those that do, won't always follow what you selected.
2) not insuring packages, I can't count the number of expensive packages I get that don't require a signature, have zero or only the included $50-$100 insurance on them. In fact it's extremely rare anything I order needs a signature, even more rare that it's insured for the full amount of the contents.
3) not sending shipping emails, or updating accounts with shipping info.
All that happens before the shipping company even gets a chance to screw something up. IMO many of these shipping problems would be fixed if companies insured the packages for their value, and required signatures. These days if you want/need you can release the signature requirement through shipping apps, but that's on the recipient then if something goes wrong. The funny part is, many businesses don't seem to understand that until that package is listed as delivered in the tracking the problem is between them and the shipping company. Most seem to think as soon as they "ship" it, their responsibility ends. Now if the business simply accepts the risk, figures replacing items lost is cheaper than buying insurance on everything they ship, that's fine. However, my experience is many companies are difficult to deal with if there's a shipping problem.
Here are great examples of this just over recent time, and I don't order that much stuff.
- Olight orders that still show pending shipment in my account from this black friday and last.....I got both orders quickly without issue.
- Well known custom knife maker sent an expensive knife, no signature, no insurance
- I had a set of Sig Kilo 3000's held at a local UPS store, signature required. They never had me sign, show ID, and they just let me walk out with the box, never even scanned it. I'm still getting emails from UPS saying I need to pickup my package or it will be returned to sender. I'm looking forward to see what happens next week when they try to find the package to return it to the sender.
- I had a least two orders from well known companies here over black friday that I was never sent any notice of shipment, they just randomly showed up.
That said I only had one scare this year (aside lots of packages arriving late like everyone), B&T refurb bipods ordered at the black friday sale sent USPS priority, they went unscanned after their first departure in the USPS system for 3 weeks before they popped up again. Figured I'd be getting a crushed empty box, but amazingly everything was fine.
