“In transit” is not an answer. It is why the same person writes to you three times, and why a failed delivery costs four times the shipping.
by Nadia Maar ·
The order is paid, the warehouse did its part, the parcel is on the van. As far as your systems are concerned the work is done — and from that moment begins the part nobody designed: the customer who wants to know when, the agent who opens the courier's portal to find out, and the second email that arrives because the first reply said “in transit”.
It is the most neglected stretch in e-commerce, and not because it is hard: because it looks like somebody else's problem. The courier delivers, we shipped. Then you count the tickets, the returns for failed delivery and the customers who do not come back, and you discover that somebody else's problem is being paid for by you.
Here is what the customer and your agent see at the same moment, for the same delivery. It is not a caricature: it is the normal situation when tracking is whatever the courier passes on.
“Do I need to be in tomorrow or not? Can I ask my sister to wait for the parcel?” — the page does not answer, so they write to you.
“What do I tell them?” — opens the courier portal and finds the same line the customer had already read on their own.
And that is how the ticket is born: Neither of them is wrong and neither of them knows. The customer writes because the page does not tell them whether they need to be home tomorrow; the agent replies with what they read, which is the same thing the customer had already read. Then the customer writes again. Two contacts generated by information that already exists — it is in the courier's round, it just never reaches this far.
A shipping status describes where a parcel sits in the courier's network. It answers the courier's question, not the customer's — who is not asking where it is, they are asking whether they need to arrange to be home tomorrow. Two different questions, and confusing them is the origin of nearly every avoidable contact.
A failed delivery is the worst outcome, and it almost always originates before shipping: a missing street number, an unstated floor, a postcode that does not belong to the town written next to it. Here is what a single error of that kind sets off.
€38 – 60 — for an address that could have been validated at order time, in half a second, while the customer was still typing it.
ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE for standard domestic shipping, to be checked against your own courier rates and the hourly cost of your support team. The fifth line carries no figure on purpose: the customer who does not come back cannot be measured, and putting an invented number next to them would devalue the four real ones.
In order of how much they remove against what they cost. The first two stand up in a few weeks and on their own cover most of the problem.
None of this requires changing courier, which is the part that usually stops the conversation. These are four things on your side of the boundary: two on the site, one on notifications, one on monitoring. The courier keeps doing exactly what it does today.
In the half-hour audit we do one very concrete thing: we take last month's support contacts and sort them into two piles — those about a real problem, and those about information that already existed. The second pile is almost always the bigger one, and it is the one that can be removed.
Out of that come two numbers of your own: how many contacts a month are avoidable and what they cost in hours. If the ratio does not justify the work I will say so — it happens when volumes are low, and in that case address validation and a better-written notification are enough.
By showing the customer what the agent sees, at the moment they see it. Most of those messages are not asking for a date: they are asking for confirmation that somebody is looking. A page saying where the parcel is, what happens next and what to do if something is off removes the first message, and with it the second and third — which are the expensive ones, because they arrive already annoyed.
Between €38 and €60, roughly four times the shipping. The bill is invisible because it arrives in pieces: the held parcel looks free, the second delivery attempt adds six to twelve euros, handling the return and the refund add another eighteen to thirty, and in between there are support minutes nobody charges to that order. The cost exists regardless: it is simply spread across different lines.
Because it contains none of the three things they are looking for: when it arrives, what they have to do, and what happens if they are out. It is a carrier status, not information for someone waiting. In practice the same person writes three times, and each time your support team does the interpreting work the tracking failed to do.
You need a translation. Every carrier uses its own status codes, and while they stay different you cannot tell the customer anything consistently: you need a map bringing all statuses into a vocabulary of your own — few entries, understandable ones — plus the rule for what to do when a status has not moved for too long. The rest is the page the customer looks at, which must say the same thing whoever is delivering.