What the seller hands over
A marketplace seller finishes at a domestic handover. The item is packed, shipped to the address the buying platform supplied, and recorded against a tracking number on the seller side. That number is domestic and short-lived, and it is the first piece of evidence to write down.
What the seller never tells you is whether the parcel arrived. Confirmation comes from the receiving warehouse, which books it in against your order. Between the tracking number and the booking there is a gap, and a parcel that never shipped looks exactly like a parcel that arrived unbooked.
The handoff point
The handoff point is the warehouse receiving desk. Everything before it belongs to the seller and the marketplace; everything after it belongs to the buying platform and, eventually, to you. The date a parcel is booked in is the boundary that decides who to ask about what.
That boundary is why a seller argument and a warehouse argument are different arguments. A seller who handed nothing over is a marketplace matter. A warehouse that received a parcel and did not book it is a platform matter, and once the platform is closed the second argument has no working channel behind it.
Write the boundary date down even when nothing is wrong. The ledger row for ACBuy, last checked on 29 September 2026, records a closed platform, which tells you where a later question can and cannot be raised at all, and which records to keep in case it can.
What the warehouse receives
A warehouse receives a parcel, opens it, checks it against the order, and holds it until you decide what happens next. Photographs belong to that step, and so does the weight the parcel is billed at later. Both are recorded at the warehouse, not at the seller.
A warehouse record covers only what was seen. An item booked in as the right one is not a quality judgement, and a photo set is not a promise about the inside of a sealed box. Read any booking as a statement about arrival rather than about condition.
If the order never reached the warehouse, none of that exists. No booking, no photographs, no billed weight. That absence is the clearest signal you will get, and it is also the hardest one to have confirmed once the platform behind the warehouse has stopped answering.
Where it usually breaks
Breaks cluster in four places. The seller never handed the parcel over. The parcel arrived without a matching order reference. The booking happened and nobody told you. Or the record exists and the channel to ask about it is gone. The last one is where a closed platform leaves you.
The balance question usually follows. When money sat against an unshipped order at the point purchasing stopped, the page on what happens to an ACBuy balance is the right place to start, because the paperwork for an order and the paperwork for a balance are kept separately.
One habit is worth keeping. Match every row in your sheet against an order record you hold, date the match, and keep the unmatched rows in a list of their own. An unanswered question is easier to carry than a wrong assumption.