Retries and deferrals
What happens between "routed" and "delivered" — automatic retries on failure, deliveries held outside a buyer's hours, and how to cancel one.
Every delivery starts as pending and ends as delivered, failed or canceled. Failures are retried automatically; deliveries that land outside a buyer's operating hours are held and sent when the buyer reopens. You don't have to do anything for either.
Open a lead and look at its delivery history to see where each one stands.
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Pending | Queued, or being handed to the buyer's endpoint and awaiting confirmation. |
| Delivered | Accepted by the buyer. This is what triggers billing. |
| Deferred | Held until the buyer's next open window. |
| Failed | Every attempt errored. |
| Canceled | You stopped it before it was sent. |
Statuses at the lead level are different and are covered in Lead statuses explained.
Retries on failure
A failed attempt is retried automatically, with increasing delays — up to three attempts in total. The delivery history shows an attempts badge and, once expanded, the exact error from each method (webhook errors).
Only after the last attempt does the delivery turn failed. You then get a delivery-failure alert (Notifications), and a Retry button appears on the delivery — useful once you've fixed the cause on the buyer's side. Retry is refused once the delivery has recorded three attempts.
If deliveries to the same buyer keep failing one after another, LeadMove pauses that buyer for 30 minutes and alerts you. Deliveries attempted during the pause fail immediately with Buyer paused by circuit breaker. It clears by itself — the point is to stop hammering a broken endpoint and to get your attention.
Deferred deliveries
A buyer set to Hold & deliver when you reopen in its operating hours doesn't get leads outside its window. The lead is still sold: the delivery goes deferred with a target time, LeadMove re-checks every 15 minutes, and sends it at the next open window. Nothing is lost and nothing needs a nudge.
Once it lands, the delivery shows Was deferred (outside operating hours) — sent when the buyer's window opened, so you can tell a slow delivery from a late one.
Buyers set to Skip me are never deferred: distribution simply doesn't consider them while they're closed, and the lead goes to another buyer.
Canceling a delivery
Cancel is available on a pending or deferred delivery — a lead you no longer want to send, or a deferred one you'd rather assign elsewhere. Canceling:
- marks the delivery canceled and guarantees it is never sent, including by the deferred sweep;
- gives the buyer's daily/weekly/monthly slot back;
- refunds the charge to a prepaid buyer's balance.
A delivery that's already delivered or failed can't be canceled — a delivered lead a buyer contests goes through disputes instead.
Common questions
A delivery has been deferred for hours. Is something stuck? No. It's waiting for the buyer's operating hours. The delivery shows the time it's scheduled for; if that time looks wrong, check the buyer's timezone and window.
Should I retry a failed delivery straight away? Only after fixing something. The automatic retries already covered the transient case — a fresh retry against an unchanged, broken endpoint just fails again and burns one of your manual attempts.
Is a failed delivery billed? No. Billing follows delivered leads. A canceled delivery also returns the buyer's slot and any prepaid charge.
The lead says failed but I want another buyer to have it. Assign it manually from the lead page. That creates a new delivery to the buyer you pick, leaving the failed one in the history.