A customer opens a parcel, tells you an item is missing, and asks for a refund. You cannot see what happened. The packer does not remember that specific box out of the two hundred they packed that week. The carrier's tracking says delivered. Whatever you decide next, you are guessing.
This is one of the few operational problems where the cost is easy to measure and the fix is almost always postponed. Below is why the usual answers fail, and what an evidence trail has to look like before it settles an argument.
The problem: nobody can see what went into the box
Three things make missing item claims unusually hard to resolve.
The evidence was never captured. Packing is fast and repetitive. Nothing about the normal flow produces a record of the contents at the moment of sealing, so by the time a claim arrives the only account of what happened is a memory of a routine task.
You cannot distinguish the failure modes. A genuine picking error, a theft in transit, and a fraudulent claim all present identically: the customer says the item is not there. Without evidence you are not judging the claim, you are choosing a policy, and the policy is usually to refund because arguing costs more than the item.
The cost is not the item. It is the refund plus the replacement shipping plus the handling time, and on card payments it can become a chargeback with its own fee and a dispute ratio that follows you. A pattern of unresolvable claims also teaches a small number of buyers that your store is an easy target.
Why the obvious fixes do not hold up
Photos on a packer's phone. The most common answer, and the weakest. The image lives in a personal gallery, is not attached to the order, and leaves the company when the person does. Even when it is found, it shows a box at one instant, which is precisely what a claim of "something was taken out before it was sealed" disputes.
A CCTV camera over the packing bench. Better as a deterrent, poor as evidence. Retrieving the right thirty seconds means knowing when that parcel was packed, and the footage is almost never tied to an order number. Nobody trawls a day of video for a single dispute.
Weighing the parcel. Genuinely useful, and cheap, but it only catches a discrepancy large enough to register against packaging weight. It also proves total mass, not that the specific item the customer named was inside.
Trusting the pick list. A scanned pick confirms that someone scanned it. It does not confirm the item reached the box, which is the exact step in question.
What evidence actually has to do
For a record to end a dispute rather than extend it, four properties do the work:
Attached to the shipment, not to a person or a folder. If proving anything requires finding a file, it will not happen at claim time. The record belongs on the transfer.
Complete over the sequence. Open box to sealed box. The gap between a photo and a sealed parcel is where every argument lives.
Attributable and timestamped. Who packed it, and when. Without that the footage is just a video of a box.
Not rewritable by the person it concerns. This is the property most systems get wrong. If a warehouse user can replace the file or change the recorded time, the evidence carries no weight in the one case where it matters, which is when that user made a mistake or took something. Read-only in the interface is not enough, because interfaces are not the only way to write to a database.
The solution: make capture part of the picking flow
Evidence that depends on somebody remembering to collect it will be missing exactly when the stakes are highest. The workable version is to make it a step, not a habit.
Record from the transfer, not from a phone gallery. If capture starts on the delivery order, the clip is bound to that order from the moment it exists. No filing, no naming convention, nothing to match up later.
Make it mandatory where it matters. A rule that blocks completion until a recording exists turns compliance into a non-decision. Scope it to outgoing shipments and leave receipts and internal moves alone, or you will train people to resent it.
Record where packing actually happens. In a two or three step flow, the parcel is packed at Pick or Pack, not at Ship. Capture belongs at the step where the box is open, while the customer-facing notification still fires at dispatch.
Keep the clip small on purpose. Evidence quality is not cinema quality. It has to show the contents and the labels legibly. Compressing during capture rather than storing raw footage is the difference between a policy you keep and one you quietly switch off when storage bills arrive.
Send it to the customer at dispatch. This is the step that changes economics. Evidence used defensively settles arguments. Evidence sent proactively prevents most of them, and it reads as confidence rather than suspicion.
Set retention from your real dispute window. Work back from the deadline you actually face rather than picking a round number. Deleting footage at thirty days when chargebacks arrive at ninety is the worst of both worlds: you carry the storage cost and still lose the case.
Where this runs in Odoo
Odoo already holds the two things that make this tractable: the transfer that the evidence should attach to, and the customer record to notify. What it does not ship is the capture step, the rule that enforces it, or the customer-facing page.
We built CODEerts Packing Video to close that gap. The packer records from the delivery order in the browser, validation can be refused until a recording exists, the customer is emailed a private link at dispatch, and the recording, its provenance and its bytes cannot be altered by the warehouse user who made it. Retention deletes old clips on a schedule you set, and a deliberate administrator deletion leaves a permanent note saying who did it and when, so the audit trail outlives the evidence.
If you would rather build it yourself, the four properties above are the specification. The hard part is not the camera, it is the last one: making sure the record cannot be rewritten by the person it is there to hold accountable.
Frequently asked questions
What evidence proves an item was in a parcel?
Evidence that is tied to the shipment record, timestamped, attributable to a named person and not editable afterwards. A photo or video is only worth as much as the chain around it: if it lives in a phone gallery with no link to the order, it proves a box existed, not that this box was that order.
Are packing photos enough, or do you need video?
A photo shows a moment, which is exactly what is disputed when the claim is that something was removed before sealing. Video covers the sequence from open box to sealed box, so it answers "it was not in there" rather than "it was in there at the instant you photographed it".
How long should you keep packing evidence?
Long enough to outlast the dispute window you actually face. Card chargebacks commonly run to around 120 days from the transaction and marketplace claim windows are often 30 to 90 days, so a 30 day retention policy tends to delete the footage just before it is needed. Set retention from the real deadline, not from storage anxiety.
Does keeping packing videos create a GDPR problem?
It can, which is why retention matters in both directions. Packing footage can capture address labels and, depending on the camera angle, staff. Keep it for a defined period tied to a legitimate purpose, be able to delete a specific recording on request, and make sure deletion leaves an audit trail so you can show what happened.
Should the customer be able to see the packing video?
Usually yes, and proactively. Sending the link at dispatch converts the evidence from something you produce during an argument into something that prevents the argument. It also changes the tone of the claims you do get, because the customer knows footage exists.
Can a warehouse user delete or replace a packing recording?
They should not be able to. If the person who packed the parcel can swap the file or backdate the record, the evidence proves nothing about the parcel the claim concerns. Treat the recording, the identity of who took it and the timestamp as a single unit that ordinary warehouse permissions cannot rewrite.
Need this built into your warehouse flow? See our Odoo custom development services, browse our Odoo apps, or read about customization versus configuration and real customization examples.
