When there’s nowhere sensible to leave a parcel and nobody’s home, the driver takes it away rather than leaving it exposed. What follows depends on your local courier: most often the parcel returns to the regional depot for another attempt, or goes straight to a local ParcelConnect collection point (such as a newsagent or convenience store), and you’ll get a card or a message telling you which. Check your dashboard for the attempted-delivery scan, since it usually names where the parcel went next. The lasting fix is giving the driver somewhere to leave things, because an Authority to Leave instruction covers future deliveries as well as this one. Without it, a parcel that needs a safe place and can’t find one will keep coming back to the depot.

Yes, and it’s worth setting up if you’re rarely home during the day. An Authority to Leave (ATL) tells the driver you accept the parcel being left in a nominated spot without a signature — a porch, behind a gate, or with a particular neighbour. Retailers often offer it at checkout, and it can usually be added afterwards through Aramex’s site using your tracking number. Two limits are worth knowing: senders can override it on items marked as needing a signature, and once you’ve authorised a drop, the risk of the parcel sitting there shifts to you. Choose somewhere genuinely out of sight from the street, and be specific — “behind the blue bin” works far better than “somewhere safe”.

ParcelConnect collection points are usually the fastest route once a delivery has been missed. Your tracking or the card left at the door names the agent holding your parcel, and it’s typically a local shop with longer hours than a regional depot — which is rather the point. Bring photo ID and your tracking number, and check the agent’s hours before travelling, since they follow the shop’s schedule rather than a courier’s. Some parcels can be sent to a collection point before any delivery attempt, though whether that’s offered depends on the sender’s service. Collect promptly either way: agents hold parcels for 7 calendar days before returning them to the local depot or sender, and your card or message carries the deadline.

Look first at whether your timeline is still moving. Scans mean the parcel is travelling and simply running late, which regional and interstate routes often do, and a few more days usually settles it. Silence is the more meaningful signal. Because deliveries here run through local operators covering their own territories, a parcel can occasionally sit at a depot waiting for the right run, and a nudge genuinely helps. Contact the depot covering your suburb rather than a national line, since they’re the ones who can physically go and look. If nothing has been scanned in over a week, tell the seller too — they can raise it as the sender, and they carry the responsibility for the order reaching you.

This is the honest weak point of a franchise network, and there is a path through it. Start with the depot or local operator covering your area, since they hold the parcel and can act fastest. If two attempts bring no response, go up to Aramex’s national customer service with your tracking number and a note of when you contacted the depot — that record matters, because it turns a query into an escalation. Tell the seller at the same time. They’re the sender, they hold the commercial relationship with the courier, and a complaint from a business account tends to move faster than one from a recipient. Australian consumer law also puts responsibility for delivery on the seller, so involving them isn’t a courtesy, it’s the correct route.

Yes, and for most Australian households that’s the sensible setup. Between Australia Post, the courier networks and whatever your overseas orders arrive on, deliveries turn up under half a dozen different names, and checking each site separately gets old quickly. Add your numbers here and everything sits in one list, with each format recognised automatically across more than 1,000 carriers. Switch alerts on to hear when something moves. And if you’d rather not copy numbers at all, connecting your Gmail means order confirmations get picked up on their own — handy in a country where a good share of parcels arrive from overseas under names you’ve never heard of.

You may also want to explore tracking for these other destinations:

• Where's your Australia parcel?

• Follow your shipment in New Zealand

• Got a parcel from China? Track it here

• Track parcels going to or from United Arab Emirates

• Check on your Great Britain delivery

• Your United States orders, all in one place

These carrier pages are worth a look too:

• Check your UBI Logistics Australia shipment

• DHL Express updates in one place

• Waiting on FedEx? Track it here

• Track your UPS parcels

• Following a China Post delivery?

• AliExpress Standard Shipping tracking, step by step