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Metrics type: Key MetricsCategory: Nerve Centre

At a glance

Late Shipments Risking Supplier Badge is a real-time alert metric tracked from Alibaba data. It lists every Trade Assurance order that has passed its committed shipping deadline and therefore counts against the on-time delivery KPI that holds up your Verified or Gold Supplier badge. For a B2B supplier each late dispatch chips at the delivery score that buyers and Alibaba both watch. The card sits in the Nerve Centre category and pairs with the badge and health sibling cards listed below to build a complete diagnostic picture.

Calculation

Vortex IQ reads your open Trade Assurance orders from the Alibaba integration and compares each order’s committed shipping deadline against the current time. Any order that is past its deadline and not yet marked dispatched is added to the alert list and counted. The card reports the live count of at-risk orders and lists each one so you can act. See the worked example below for a typical reading.

Worked example

A representative reading of Late Shipments Risking Supplier Badge for a typical Alibaba supplier. Suppose three escrow orders were due to ship by 18 Jun 26 but a component delay held them in the warehouse, and the card now reads 3. Two are one day past deadline and one is four days past, so the four-day order is the most damaging to the on-time delivery KPI and gets dispatched first, with proactive buyer messages sent on all three to protect the relationship. The interpretation is that clearing this backlog quickly limits the dent to the delivery score before it threatens the badge. For deeper investigation into what stalled fulfilment, use Vortex Mind to trace upstream causes; to ask which buyers are affected in plain English, use Ask Viq.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against Alibaba Seller dashboard

Where to look in Alibaba’s own dashboard: Late and pending dispatches appear in My Alibaba under Orders, filtered to Trade Assurance orders awaiting shipment, with delivery performance summarised in the Account Health view. Confirm period boundaries and filter settings match the Vortex IQ profile to reconcile cleanly. Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ: Cross-connector reconciliation: complement with the sibling badge and delivery cards in the same category for the full diagnostic picture. For divergence investigations, use Vortex Mind.

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Q: How often does Late Shipments Risking Supplier Badge update? This is a real-time alert card, so it re-evaluates on the standard data refresh (typically every 30-60 minutes for live integrations). For an immediate check, force a manual refresh from the dashboard. Q: Why does my Alibaba dashboard show a different number? The most common reasons are assessment-window differences (Alibaba may batch shipments into a fixed delivery window while Vortex IQ flags each one live), time-zone alignment of deadlines, and filter scope (profile-level vs Alibaba’s all-account view). Match these settings before assuming a real divergence. Q: How does Late Shipments Risking Supplier Badge relate to other Nerve Centre metrics? These late orders are the raw inputs to the on-time delivery KPI, which in turn feeds the Supplier Badge KPI Threshold Crossed alert and the Alibaba Supplier Health Score. Read it alongside those cards to see how today’s backlog translates into badge risk. Q: Can I customise the alert threshold? Yes, the deadline grace and what counts as past-due are configurable per profile in the Alert Rules tab. Adjust them to match your fulfilment commitments and business baseline rather than relying on the generic default.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Late Shipments Risking Supplier Badge is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Alibaba and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.