Skip to main content
Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier

​
At a glance

Share of APC Overnight consignments in the period that threw at least one tracking exception event before final delivery. “Exception” means any non-progressing scan: recipient absent, carded for collection, refused, address invalid, access denied, customs held (for Globe export), depot misroute, damage report. A consignment that threw an exception but eventually delivered on time still counts towards this rate, the metric tracks operational friction, not lost deliveries.

​
Calculation

Calculated automatically from your APC Overnight data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

​
Worked example

A UK B2B medical-supplies distributor based in Reading, around 2,800 consignments per month split 75 percent NextDay-9am (clinic and surgery deliveries) and 25 percent NextDay-12 (retail pharmacy network). Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days (10 Feb 26 to 11 Mar 26). The card reads 2.93 percent on the dial, the alert at >3% is just clear (1 more exception lands amber). Five things to notice:
  1. CARDED dominates the count, and Friday dominates CARDED. Forty-one carded consignments, of which 26 were on Fridays, where surgeries close at lunchtime and the driver finds nobody to sign. The action is upstream: change the booking process to flag Friday clinic deliveries for delivery before 12:00 (move them to NextDay-9am), or hold back to Monday. This is a workflow fix, not a carrier fix.
  2. INVALID-ADDRESS at 0.64 percent points to a data-entry problem, not a postcode-database problem. APC’s depot scanners now use real-time PAF (Postcode Address File) lookup; a parcel reaching INVALID-ADDRESS state has usually had a manual address override at booking. Spot-check the 18 consignments against the order source: if 12 came from a single staff terminal, retrain.
  3. ACCESS-DENIED for medical premises is fixable with delivery instructions. Fourteen exceptions where the practice is behind a gated entry or a coded door. APC’s API supports a deliveryInstructions field per consignment; populating it with gate codes drops the access-denied rate by 70 to 90 percent. Pair this number with the dispatch system’s “delivery notes” usage rate.
  4. The 2.93 percent headline is just under the alert. Premium UK express benchmark is 0.8 to 1.5 percent for an established merchant; this brand is running roughly 2x the peer median. Three months ago the same number was 1.7 percent; the upward trend is the real signal, not the absolute level.
  5. Cross-reference with OTD Rate. This brand’s OTD reads 96.4 percent on the same window. Most of the carded and access-denied consignments did eventually deliver (often next day after the carded scan), so the lateness from this card is partially absorbed by APC’s free-redelivery network. If exception rate doubled but OTD only dropped 1 point, the network is recovering most of the friction; if both move together the network is failing.

​
Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Exception rate is a leading indicator. Pair it with these to act before the friction becomes a customer complaint:

​
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in APC’s own portal: APC Overnight Customer Portal → Track & Trace → Exception Reports. Filter Date Range = Last 30 Days, Exception Type = All. The portal exposes per-event-code counts; these should reconcile with the breakdown surfaced in this card. For account-managed customers, APC’s QBR includes a depot-by-depot exception breakdown plus driver-cause attribution. The portal aggregate matches the card; the QBR slices are richer. Why our number may legitimately differ from APC’s portal: Internal identity (within APC): apc_exception_rate >= apc_failed_delivery_rate. Every failed delivery threw at least one exception, but most exceptions resolve via redelivery. If the two numbers ever cross, there is an ingestion bug. Cross-connector reconciliation:
Documentation cross-reference (for agencies running multiple UK shippers). Exception-rate metrics exist with conceptually similar definitions across other UK carriers and 3PLs. These are not parallel measurements of the same shipments; the populations are independent.

​
Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Exception rate is rising but OTD is steady, why? APC’s redelivery network is absorbing the friction. Roughly 60 to 80 percent of CARDED and ACCESS-DENIED exceptions deliver successfully on the next attempt, often the same week. As long as the second attempt lands by the original promised date, the consignment counts as on-time on OTD Rate but exception on this card. The leading-indicator value of this card is precisely that it moves before OTD does. Treat a 1-point exception-rate rise as a 0.3-point OTD rise pencilled in for the following week unless action is taken. What is the difference between a CARDED parcel and a FAILED parcel? CARDED means the driver attempted delivery and left a calling card; the parcel returns to the depot for redelivery (free, normally next working day). FAILED means the consignment exhausted attempts (typically three) without successful delivery and is now waiting for instructions (return-to-sender, customer collection, or further redelivery via a paid request). CARDED is a friction signal; FAILED is a near-loss. Should I aim for zero exception rate? No. A meaningful share of exceptions are recipient-side (CARDED, REFUSED, ACCESS-DENIED) and structurally outside the merchant’s control. The healthy steady-state for a UK B2C book on APC NextDay is 0.8 to 1.5 percent; for B2B clinic-and-surgery deliveries it is 1.5 to 2.5 percent (more access-control complexity). Aim to keep the trend flat and the cause-mix sensible, not the headline at zero. My exception rate spiked yesterday, what do I check first? In order: (1) APC’s service alerts in the customer portal, depot-level disruption produces uniform exception spikes regardless of cause-code. (2) The dominant cause-code in the spike, if CARDED, the day-of-week is the answer (Friday is the typical culprit on B2B routes). If INVALID-ADDRESS, check whether a recent CSV-import of orders introduced bad data. If ACCESS-DENIED, check whether a B2B customer changed gates or codes. (3) Geography, if the spike concentrates in two postcodes, the issue is local; if uniform, it is network-wide. Why is my INVALID-ADDRESS rate higher on B2B than B2C? Counter-intuitive but consistent across the network: B2C addresses pass through Shopify / WooCommerce checkout with PAF lookup and rarely produce invalid addresses (modern checkout libraries catch typos). B2B addresses come from spreadsheet imports, EDI orders, and account-team-keyed bookings, where PAF validation is often skipped or run loosely. Tighten the upstream booking-system validation; do not blame APC. Can exceptions be removed from the count if they were customer fault? The card surfaces every exception event regardless of cause; that is by design (the customer experiences the friction whether it was their fault or not). For QBR conversations with APC’s account team, filter the cause-code breakdown to exclude REFUSED and ACCESS-DENIED on B2C addresses; APC will accept those as out-of-network. CARDED on a B2B medical clinic where the surgery published wrong opening hours is a process fix on the merchant side, not an APC service-credit candidate. Why does APC’s portal show a different exception rate? Two usual reasons. (1) Different denominator APC’s portal often divides exceptions by attempted deliveries, Vortex IQ divides by all consignments in the period (delivered + failed + RTS). The portal number is therefore systematically higher. (2) Different code list APC’s portal sometimes uses a narrower “service-failure exceptions” subset that excludes MISROUTE and DAMAGE-REPORT. Reconcile by toggling the portal’s “all event types” filter. How does this interact with insurance and damage claims? DAMAGE-REPORT exceptions on this card flow through to Open Claims and Claim Value (open). Each DAMAGE-REPORT is a candidate for an APC carriage refund or insurance claim, depending on whether the merchant carries APC’s enhanced liability cover. The card does not auto-flag claim-eligible exceptions; that is a manual workflow.

​
Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Exception Rate is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across APC Overnight 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.