At a glance
Share of APC Overnight consignments that arrived at the addressee on or before the contracted service-promise time. APC sells time-definite SLAs (NextDay by 9am, by 10:30, by 12:00, NextDay anytime, Pallet 24, Pallet 48), so “on time” is judged against the promised cutoff time on the promised day, not just “delivered the next day”. Each delivered consignment scores 0 or 1 against its own service-code aim.
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 homewares brand, around 1,200 outbound consignments per week, dual-carrier strategy: APC Overnight on time-definite NextDay-12 for high-AOV breakable items (£75+ orders, glassware, ceramics) and Royal Mail Tracked 48 for everything below £50. APC is roughly 35 percent of total parcel volume but 65 percent of revenue-weighted shipments. Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days (10 Feb 26 to 11 Mar 26). APC leg only:
The card reads 95.9 percent on the dial, the alert at
<95% is just clear. Five things to notice:
- NextDay-12 sets the headline. It is 91 percent of APC volume; the headline rate moves with NextDay-12 directly. If NextDay-12 dips below 95 percent the dial trips. Pair with NextDay 9am Service Promise if the brand also runs 9am for B2B; the 9am book is contractually tighter and demands its own dial.
- Refund eligibility is the sub-text. The 69 NextDay-12 parcels that delivered after 12:00 are each a candidate for an APC service-failure refund on the carriage charge (£8 to £14 per shipment). At an estimated £11 average refund, that is roughly £760 of recoverable carriage per 30 days if the merchant files within APC’s 14-day claim window. Most merchants leave that money on the table, see Open Claims.
- Pallet 24 at 93.8 percent is small-volume noise, but watch the trend. 32 pallets per month, two late = 6.2 percent late rate. One bad pallet trips the percentage. But if the same depot keeps producing the misses (Birmingham, Cumbernauld, and Glasgow are common offenders for pallet routing), see OTD by Origin Depot, the small count is the early signal of a structural network gap.
- Compare to Royal Mail leg, not to the absolute target. This same merchant’s Royal Mail Tracked 48 leg likely runs at 96 to 98 percent OTD at £3.40 per parcel. APC at 95.9 percent and £9.85 looks worse on both dials, that is the point: the brand pays APC’s premium for the time-definite cutoff, not for a higher OTD percentage. Royal Mail is “on the right day”; APC is “by 12 noon on the right day”. Different denominators.
- The “rate suddenly degraded” debug case. A 4 to 8 point sudden drop on premium UK express is rarely the carrier breaking; it is almost always (a) a depot capacity squeeze in late autumn / Q4 peak, (b) a single warehouse process change pushing dispatch-cutoff later in the day so parcels miss APC’s last collection, or (c) an account-level rate dispute that has triggered de-prioritisation. Royal Mail-style strike risk does not apply: APC drivers are owner-operators on franchise depots, not unionised employees, so industrial action is rare.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
On-time delivery is the customer-facing outcome metric. Pair it with these to diagnose root cause: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 30 Days, Service = All, Status = Delivered + Failed. The portal exposes a Delivered On Time aggregate at the top of that filtered view; that figure 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 × (1 - apc_otd_rate), ignoring rounding and in-transit treatment of the most recent two days.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Documentation cross-reference (for agencies running multiple UK shippers). OTD-rate metrics exist with conceptually similar definitions across other UK carriers and 3PLs. These are not parallel measurements of the same shipments; they are independent operations. Use these cross-links only to navigate documentation.
royal_mail.roy_otd_rate(UK national postal carrier peer)hermes_evri.her_otd_rate(UK courier peer)dpd.dpd_otd_rate(UK premium courier peer)shipbob.sb_otd_rate(3PL peer)
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
APC vs Royal Mail vs DPD, which should I send with? Different jobs. APC wins on time-definite premium UK express, especially the 9am and 10:30 B2B book (medical, dental, automotive). Royal Mail wins on consumer trust, letterbox-friendly small items, and per-parcel cost on standard tracked services. DPD wins on the Predict 1-hour-window experience for B2C high-value parcels. The healthy multi-carrier pattern is to use APC for time-definite high-AOV, Royal Mail Tracked 48 for everyday, and DPD or Evri for the consumer-experience tier. Read this card alongsideroyal_mail.roy_otd_rate and dpd.dpd_otd_rate, and Avg Shipping Cost to see the cost-vs-reliability trade.
Why does the card show 95.9 percent but my customer-service tickets are spiking?
Three usual reasons. (1) The 4.1 percent late tail is concentrated on premium-promise traffic, the customers who paid £9.20 for “by 12pm” and got a parcel at 13:45. They complain at roughly 10x the rate of standard-shipping customers. (2) Customer perception is anchored on PDP copy, not service codes. “By 12pm” on the product page is what the customer remembers; APC’s 17:30 cutoff for NextDay anytime is invisible to them. (3) The headline averages over very different services. Always look at the per-service breakdown alongside the aggregate; the per-service is the actionable reading.
My OTD just dropped 6 points this morning, what is the playbook?
In order of likelihood: (1) Check APC’s service alerts in the customer portal, depot capacity squeezes and weather events get posted there before they show up here. (2) Check Exception Rate, a spike in “address invalid” or “access denied” exceptions points to upstream label-data issues, not carrier failure. (3) Check OTD by Origin Depot, if the drop is concentrated in 2 or 3 depots the issue is local; if it is uniform the issue is network-wide. (4) Check NextDay 9am Service Promise separately, if 9am holds but NextDay-12 drops, APC is prioritising the most expensive tier (normal during peak). (5) Open a ticket with APC’s account team if (1) to (4) do not explain it.
Can I claim a refund for every late shipment in this card’s denominator?
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, (b) Pallet services, (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.
Tracked vs untracked, how does APC handle it?
APC is fully tracked. Every consignment carries a barcoded label, every service produces sortation and POD scans. Untracked is not a concept on APC’s network, that is a Royal Mail concern. The OTD denominator is therefore unambiguous on APC.
Why does Shopify show “shipped” but APC tracking is empty?
Two-stage handover. Shopify marks the order shipped when the label is generated (fulfilment.created); APC does not show a tracking event until the depot collection scan, typically 1 to 4 hours after the driver picks up. If the gap exceeds 12 hours the parcel was probably never collected, check whether dispatch-cutoff time has slipped. APC’s last collection of the day is typically 16:00 to 16:30 in most regions; orders booked after that miss collection.
How should I plan for Q4 / BFCM 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 OTD dial, when it inevitably drops 3 to 8 points, does not translate one-for-one into broken promises.
Why does the “today” reading bounce around?
Volume. A merchant doing 60 consignments a day has a 1.7 percentage-point step per shipment on the daily reading. Use the rolling 30-day reading for trend, the daily reading only for outage detection. Below 100 daily consignments, the daily reading is too noisy to act on.