At a glance
Count of shipments that missed their APC service-promise delivery time in the period. APC sells time-definite SLAs (NextDay by 9am, by 10:30, by 12:00, NextDay anytime, two-day Pallet), so “late” is judged against the promised cutoff time on the promised day, not just “delivered today vs tomorrow”. Each shipment that overruns its specific cutoff scores 1.
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 premium DTC brand selling £180 average-order-value precision watches. Customer base 70% London and Home Counties, 25% rest of UK mainland, 5% Highlands and Islands. APC Overnight is the primary carrier for orders over £100 because the merchant offers a “by 12pm next day” promise on the product page, and APC NextDay-12 is the only premium service the brand has negotiated rates for. Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 13 Mar 26 for the trailing 7 days (06 Mar 26 to 12 Mar 26).
The card reads 22 as the headline; the alert at
>5% of total is not tripped at the aggregate level (4.3%), but Pallet 24 is at 8.3% on small volume. Five things to notice:
- Money-back-on-late candidates: the 14 NextDay-12 parcels that delivered same-day after 12:00. Each is a candidate for an APC service-failure refund on the carriage charge (typically £8 to £14 per shipment for NextDay-12). At an estimated £11 average refund, that is £154 of recoverable carriage if the merchant files within APC’s 14-day claim window. Pair with
apc_open_claimsto track filing rate. - The five day-2 NextDay-12 parcels are worse, not better. Customer paid for “by 12pm tomorrow”, got a parcel a day late. These are likely refund-and-discount events on the order itself (typical £15 to £25 goodwill voucher), not just carriage refunds. £100 to £125 of margin loss across five orders.
- Pallet 24 8.3% is a depot-network signal, not a volume one. 12 pallets is small; one bad pallet trips the percentage. But Birmingham depot has shown up on
apc_depot_otdas a repeat offender three weeks running, the pattern is real even though the count is small. - The 4.3% headline does not fail the alert. The merchant’s promise to customers is “by 12pm next day”; the alert at 5 percent gives one percentage-point of headroom over the bare promise. If late percent climbs into the 4.5 to 5.0 zone for two weeks running, the next conversation is with APC’s account team about depot routing.
- Compare against the same week last year in
apc_late_shipments_counthistorical view. 13 Mar 25 reading was 1.8 percent, the doubling to 4.3 percent is the real story. Investigateapc_route_otdandapc_depot_otdto find which corner of the network slipped.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Late shipments is a count, not a rate. It needs context to act on. Pair it with these:Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in APC’s own portal: APC Overnight Customer Portal → log in to Track & Trace → Reports → Service Performance. Filter by Date Range = Last 7 Days, Service = All, Status = Delivered + Failed. The portal exposes a “Late deliveries” filter on the consignments table directly; each row shows promised cutoff vs actual POD timestamp. The aggregated count at the top of that filtered view is what should reconcile with this card. For account-managed customers, APC’s quarterly business review (QBR) deck published by the account manager carries the same figure broken down by depot, by service, and by failure-cause code. Vortex IQ pulls the same underlying scan data through APC’s API; the QBR adds APC’s own commentary. Why our number may legitimately differ from APC’s portal:
Internal identity (within APC):
apc_late_shipments_count = apc_shipments_total - (apc_shipments_total × apc_otd_rate), ignoring rounding. The two cards are paired views of the same denominator; if they disagree by more than a unit or two, the gap is from in-transit treatment of the most recent two days.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why is APC late count rising on a service that has held up for months? Three usual reasons, in order of likelihood. (1) Volume mix shift. A new product launch or wholesale account has pushed B2B replenishment volume to a depot that wasn’t sized for it. Checkapc_depot_otd and apc_shipments_by_destination. (2) Booking-cutoff slippage. Orders dispatched too late in the afternoon miss APC’s last collection. Check whether dispatch-cutoff time has crept later in the day (warehouse floor problem, not APC). (3) APC network event. Most common in late autumn (industrial action risk, Q4 volume saturation, weather). APC publishes service alerts in the customer portal; check there before opening an account-team ticket.
Can I claim a refund for every late shipment in this count?
No, only on guaranteed services. APC offers money-back-on-late on its time-definite premium tiers (NextDay-9am, NextDay-10:30, NextDay-12) where the failure was APC’s responsibility. You cannot claim on (a) NextDay anytime (no time guarantee), (b) Pallet services (different SLA structure), (c) failures caused by recipient absence, refusal, wrong address, or access issues, (d) declared force-majeure events. Filing window is typically 14 days from the failed POD; check your contract for exact terms.
Why does APC’s portal show a different late count than this card?
Most often: APC’s portal is silently excluding “customer fault” failures from the headline late number. Vortex IQ counts every overrun. Reconcile by toggling APC’s portal filter to include all failure causes. The remaining gap is usually time-zone boundary or in-transit treatment, both detailed in the reconcile section above.
Should I switch my late shipments to a cheaper carrier?
Almost never. The reason a brand pays APC’s premium is the time-definite promise; the customer expects “by 12pm tomorrow” because the merchant promised it. Switching to a cheaper carrier with no time guarantee solves the carrier problem by abandoning the customer promise, which kills repeat-rate. The right action is usually (a) file the refunds you are owed, (b) push APC’s account team for depot fixes, and (c) re-look at the 5 to 10 percent of shipments that don’t actually need premium service.
My late count is small in absolute terms, do I still need to act?
For premium UK express, yes. The cohort that buys high-AOV products at premium delivery promise has the highest expectation and the lowest tolerance. A single late £200 watch order with a “by 12pm” promise produces more cancellation, refund, and review-site damage than ten late £20 t-shirt orders on Royal Mail Tracked. Treat each late premium parcel as a margin-loss event, not a logistics statistic.
How do I split late shipments by B2B vs B2C?
APC’s API does not expose a B2B flag directly, but the booking-account or consignor-reference can carry one. Vortex IQ doesn’t auto-split today. Pragmatic proxies: filter apc_shipments_by_service (NextDay-9am and Pallet are heavily B2B; NextDay anytime is heavily B2C), or filter by destination postcode pattern (commercial vs residential). The roadmap includes a B2B/B2C tag input on the manifest.
APC missed the cutoff but the customer didn’t complain, do I still record it?
Yes. The point of this card is to surface drift before customers notice. Most “missed by 5 minutes” 9am parcels never produce a complaint, but the cumulative pattern across a week predicts the customer-service ticket spike at 7 to 14 days lag. Treat the card as an early warning, not a complaint count.
How do I plan for Q4 / Black Friday peak on APC?
Three actions. (1) Pre-book volume capacity with APC’s account team in September for November and December (premium UK express books capacity tighter than Royal Mail). (2) Pull dispatch-cutoff forward by 60 to 90 minutes during peak weeks; APC’s depot saturation pushes routing decisions back, and the parcel that misses 16:00 collection becomes day-2. (3) Soften the customer promise on the PDP for peak weeks (move “by 12pm” to “next business day”) so the late count, when it inevitably rises 3 to 8 percentage points, doesn’t translate one-for-one into broken promises.