Lead statuses explained
What every lead, delivery and dispute status means in LeadMove, and what to do about each one.
A lead in LeadMove carries three independent statuses, each answering a different question:
- Routing status — what happened to the lead inside your pipeline. Shown in the Leads list.
- Delivery status — what happened to each individual delivery to a buyer. Shown in the lead's delivery history.
- Dispute status — whether a buyer contested the lead after receiving it.
Most confusion comes from reading one as another. The classic case: a lead can be routed (sold to a buyer) while its delivery is still deferred (waiting for that buyer's business hours). Both are true at the same time.
Routing status
| Status | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Pending | Accepted, distribution is running or about to. | Nothing — this normally lasts seconds. |
| Held | Manual review is on for this pipeline. The lead is stored and scored, but won't be distributed until you approve it. | Approve it, send it to a buyer of your choice, or reject it, from the lead page or the leads list. If auto-release is set, it distributes by itself after the delay. |
| Routed | Distribution picked at least one buyer. | If the buyer says nothing arrived, check the delivery status below — it may be deferred or failed. |
| Unrouted | Distribution ran but no buyer matched or was available (conditions, caps reached, outside hours with "skip"). | Open the lead: the fix and re-run card shows why it stalled, lets you edit the fields inline and re-runs distribution in one click. Or select several in the leads list and hit Retry routing, or assign it manually, or "Mark reviewed" to dismiss it from your attention counters. |
| Invalid | A required field is missing or malformed. The lead is kept so it can be corrected. | The webhook response (HTTP 422) includes the leadId — fix the data at the source and re-send. |
| Duplicate | Matched your deduplication rules, and the pipeline is set to "Keep, don't send to buyers". Never billed. | Nothing. If legitimate leads get caught, widen the dedup window or fields in pipeline settings. |
| Spam | Matched the pipeline's intake spam filter. Quarantined, never distributed, never billed. | The matched conditions are shown on the lead page. False positive? Adjust the filter and re-send the lead. |
| Transferred | A forwarding rule in transfer mode moved it to another pipeline. This pipeline's buyers won't receive it. | Find the lead in the target pipeline — that's where its life continues. |
| Failed | Every delivery to the selected buyer(s) failed, or was rejected by the buyer. | Open the lead: the fix and re-run card shows the last delivery error, or the buyer's reason for rejecting it, lets you edit the fields inline and re-runs distribution in one click. The delivery history has the full errors; you can also retry a single failed delivery (not a rejected one), Retry routing on a selection in the leads list, or assign it to another buyer. |
| Rejected | You rejected a held lead during manual review. | Nothing — this is a final state. |
Delivery status
Once a lead is routed, each buyer delivery gets its own status:
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pending | Queued, or being handed to the buyer's endpoint (email, webhook, Google Sheets or SMS) and awaiting confirmation. |
| Delivered | Confirmed received. This is what triggers billing. |
| Failed | The endpoint returned an error after retries. |
| Deferred | The buyer is outside its operating hours and is set to "Hold & deliver when you reopen". |
| Canceled | The delivery was withdrawn before it went out — you rejected the lead during review, or the routing was undone. Never billed. |
| Rejected by buyer | The buyer's endpoint answered 2xx but its response said no, per the Buyer response rule on that delivery method. Final, never retried, never billed: wallet and credits are given back and the slot does not count toward caps. The lead is marked failed with the buyer's reason on its fix-and-re-run card. |
Only Delivered and Failed are settled outcomes. Everything else is still in flight, which is why the dashboard's Delivery health shows those counts beside the percentage instead of inside it.
You can filter the Leads list on any of these with Delivery status in the filters panel — "show me everything that failed", "show me what's deferred". It's a different question from Routing status: a lead stays routed even when its delivery failed.
“Deferred” is a delivery status, not a lead status
A lead shows a Deferred badge when it's routed but all its deliveries are waiting for the buyer to reopen. Nothing is wrong and nothing is lost: LeadMove re-checks every 15 minutes and delivers automatically at the buyer's next open window. If you'd rather have leads go to another buyer instead of waiting, switch that buyer's outside-hours behavior to "Skip me" in operating hours.
Dispute status
After delivery, a buyer (or you) can contest a lead — wrong number, unreachable, out of area…
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| None | No dispute. |
| Disputed | A dispute is open and waiting for your decision. If you don't respond before the dispute window closes, it's auto-accepted. |
| Accepted | You granted a credit or a replacement lead. The lead is removed from your revenue figures. |
Rejecting a dispute returns the lead to None. Full flow, deadlines and replacement credits: How disputes work.
Common questions
My lead says "routed" but the buyer received nothing. Why? Routed means a buyer was selected, not that delivery succeeded. Open the lead and check its delivery status: deferred means it's waiting for the buyer's business hours, failed means the endpoint errored, pending means it's in flight.
What's the difference between "held" and "deferred"? Held happens before distribution: the lead waits for your approval (manual review). Deferred happens after: the lead is sold and waits for the buyer's opening hours.
Am I billed for spam or duplicate leads? No. Spam and rejected duplicates never reach a buyer and never count as billable deliveries. They also don't count toward your plan's monthly lead quota — only leads that aren't spam or a rejected duplicate do (including invalid ones, since those are still stored).
Can I recover an "invalid" lead? Yes — invalid leads are stored, not dropped. Fix the field at the source and send the lead again, or edit and re-submit it manually.
What should I do about "unrouted" leads piling up? Each one means sellable inventory found no buyer. The usual causes, in order: routing conditions too narrow, buyer caps reached, all matching buyers closed with "skip" behavior. The lead page shows the routing trace — it tells you exactly which buyers were considered and why each was excluded.
I fixed the cause. How do I give the lead another chance? Open the lead. Anything unrouted or failed gets a fix and re-run card at the top: it says why the lead stalled (which buyers the last pass skipped and why, or the last delivery error), the fields are editable right there, and one button — Save & re-run distribution — saves your edits and sends the lead back through. Edits are saved as typed: no re-formatting, no re-scoring. If nothing needs changing, the same button reads Re-run distribution. It puts the lead through the same distribution it went through the first time, with today's buyers, caps and prices, and the routing trace records the new pass. Leads waiting on a late quality score re-run by themselves — you don't have to.
I have a pile of unrouted leads. Do I have to open them one by one? No. In the leads list, filter on Status: Unrouted, tick the box in the header to select the page, and hit Retry routing — up to 50 at a time. Leads that got routed in the meantime are skipped, and the toast says how many. Leads still awaiting review are skipped too: approve them first — from their review card, or select them and hit Approve (N). The toast also offers Show these N, which opens the list on exactly the leads that went back through distribution, so you can watch them settle.
Can I send a batch of leads to one buyer? Yes. Select them in the leads list and hit Send to buyer… — useful when a buyer has just been added, reopened, or its cap has rolled over. Pick the buyer and, if you want, one delivery method instead of all of them. Each lead goes through the same checks as an assignment on the lead page: the buyer's duplicate window, its caps, its prepaid balance, and any compensation credit it has left. Leads held for review are included, and sending one approves it — the same decision as Send to a buyer instead… on its review card, with its own line in the lead's history. A held lead that a forwarding rule would transfer to another pipeline is skipped: approve it to let it go. Leads that are already routed are never included — a sold lead gets a second buyer from its own page, one at a time. The dialog then tells you what went through and what didn't, reason by reason, and offers Send the N anyway for the two things you're allowed to override: a duplicate, and a buyer at quota. An insufficient prepaid balance is never overridden — top the buyer up and send again. Owners and admins only.
I sent a batch. How do I find those leads again? Two ways. Straight after the action, use Show these N — in the toast for a retry, in the dialog for a send. It opens the leads list on exactly that batch, marked with a Batch: N leads chip you can remove to get the full list back. Everything else still works on top of it: sort, extra filters, and Export CSV, which then exports only the batch. Later on, open Activity: every bulk approve, bulk retry and bulk send is one line there, and each links back to the leads it touched — for a send, only the ones that actually went, never the skipped ones.
Re-running can't sell a lead twice
A lead that was already placed with a buyer is refused, whatever you press and however many times. The same guard makes the pipeline safe against a duplicated internal event, so a lead is never handed to two buyers by accident.