Do you actively track your e-commerce shipments?

[pasqal]

I own an online store, and one of my largest pains is carriers messing up shipments:

• delays of days or even weeks for no apparent reason
• false "no one at home" delivery attempts
• carrier notifies the shipment is delivered, but it really isn't
• carrier not showing up on agreed upon delivery date
• lost packages
• packages delivered at the wrong address
• carriers continually ignoring our instructions
• calling the carrier's customer service is totally useless
• ... you name it

We have worked with most carriers in our territory (from the UPS, DHL, Fedex, TNT to many other lower cost alternatives) and found that these issues are pervasive across the whole industry, no exception. Fortunately these are a relatively small % of all packages, but still the impact on those customers is devastating.

This is why we proactively monitor all our shipments to early detect troublesome shipments and act upon those (usually shipping a second package, and then having to deal with both packages being eventually delivered, which is a problem of its own kind and a huge cost... but at least we minimize impact on the customer).

Although we have partly automated the shipment monitoring process, this is still largely manual and labor-intensive. I have always wondered if other e-commerce businesses also do this, or if they just avoid that labor cost completely and only act once the customer claims "where is my order?".

So, my questions would be:

1. Do you proactively monitor shipments to early detect any issues before the customer files a claim?
2. If you don't, why? Is it just not worth the cost?
3. If you do, how do you do it? Any tools/apps you use to automate this? Ideally I would look for something that would send us a daily email whenever any issue has happened (fake/wrong deliveries, fake "not at home"s, etc.) or looks like it is about to happen (shipment looks like it is not going to make it by the expected date).

Thanks! 🙏

Jose

[Kalen_Jordan]

We have a few workflow automation templates in place around this - for example detecting delays in deliveries and sending an email notification:

https://www.getmesa.com/apps/tracktor/integrate/email/send-email-if-tracktor-package-is-delayed-in-t...

I suspect I could probably automate the daily email you're describing with all of those different problem cases.