At a glance
A real-time alert list of Australia Post Express Post consignments that have passed their next-business-day guarantee window without a delivered scan. Express Post carries a published delivery guarantee between eligible postcodes: a miss makes the parcel eligible for an automatic postage refund. This card surfaces those misses the moment they cross the line so your team can file the refund claim and warn the customer before they call you.
| What it lists | Each Express Post consignment where now > guaranteed_delivery_date and there is no delivered scan, between two postcodes inside the Express Post guaranteed network. One row per breached consignment, with tracking number, lodgement date, destination postcode, and hours past guarantee. |
| API endpoint | GET /shipping/v1/track/items/{trackingNumber} (Australia Post Tracking API) for the live events[] stream, joined to the lodgement record from the Shipping and Tracking API where product_id is an Express Post service (EXP, Express Post, Express Post Signature). The guarantee window is derived from the lodgement date plus the Express Post next-business-day rule for the origin / destination postcode pair. |
| Service-tier scope | Express Post and Express Post Signature only. Parcel Post, Standard, and international services do not carry the next-business-day guarantee and are not eligible for this refund clause. They are excluded from the list. |
| Eligibility gate | The guarantee only applies between postcodes inside the published Express Post network. A breach is only listed when both origin and destination sit inside that network; outside-network Express Post is “fastest available” with no guarantee and is filtered out. See Express Post Address-Eligibility Rate for the eligibility view. |
| Lodgement-cutoff handling | Express Post must be lodged before the daily cut-off to start the next-business-day clock that day; a late lodgement shifts the guarantee date forward one business day. The card uses the carrier-recorded lodgement scan timestamp, not the label-print time, to set the clock. |
| Weekends and public holidays | The clock counts business days only. Lodgement on Friday after cut-off guarantees Tuesday (where Monday is a working day). National and state public holidays are excluded from the business-day count. |
| Time window | RT (real time). The card re-evaluates on each tracking-event ingestion cycle and clears a row once a delivered scan lands. |
| Alert trigger | >0 Express Post shipments past next-business-day (any breached consignment populates the list and fires the alert). |
| Roles | owner, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Australia Post 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 Sydney-based premium menswear brand ships its priority orders on Express Post Signature. On a normal day it lodges 180 to 220 Express Post consignments before the 17:00 AEDT cut-off at its local Business Hub. Reading taken at 11:00 AEDT on 14 Apr 26.| Tracking number | Lodged | Destination | Guaranteed by | Hours past | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33ABC…8841 | 10 Apr 26, 16:40 | 3000 (Melbourne CBD) | 11 Apr 26 | 18h | In transit, no delivered scan |
| 33ABC…9120 | 10 Apr 26, 16:55 | 2600 (Canberra) | 11 Apr 26 | 18h | Held at depot |
| 33ABC…9377 | 11 Apr 26, 12:05 | 4000 (Brisbane CBD) | 14 Apr 26 | 4h | Onboard for delivery |
- Every row here is refund-eligible, and the refund is yours to claim, not automatic in practice. Australia Post’s Express Post guarantee makes the postage refundable on a missed guarantee, but the merchant has to lodge the claim through MyPost Business or the eParcel Customer Centre. Treat each row as a recoverable cost. For this brand, Express Post Signature runs around 12.30 AUD per parcel: 3 breaches is roughly 37 AUD of recoverable postage today, and at a 1 percent weekly miss rate on 1,000 parcels that is 120 to 130 AUD a week of leakage if nobody files.
- The 4000-Brisbane parcel is “onboard for delivery” and only 4 hours past. It may still deliver today and clear itself off the list. The card keeps it visible until a delivered scan lands; do not pre-emptively refund a parcel that is out with the driver. File once the day closes without delivery.
- The 2600-Canberra parcel held at depot is the genuine breach. “Held at depot” past the guarantee with no out-for-delivery scan means it missed the network. That is the one to action first: file the postage refund and send the customer a proactive “running late, here is tracking” message before they open a WISMO ticket.
- Lodgement cut-off is the most common own-goal. If a parcel is lodged at 17:40 when the cut-off is 17:00, the guarantee clock starts the next business day, so what looks like a breach on your internal clock is on time on the carrier’s. The card uses the carrier lodgement scan, so it will not list a parcel that was simply lodged late. If your warehouse is consistently lodging after cut-off, that is a despatch-process fix, not a carrier problem.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Express Post SLA breach is the real-time refund-recovery list. Pair it with these to see the trend behind the alerts and the cost at stake:| Card | Why pair it with Express Post SLA Breach | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Express Post Next-Business-Day OTD | The rate view of the same guarantee. | This card is the live worklist; the OTD card is the 30-day percentage. A rising breach list confirms a falling OTD reading. |
| On-Time Delivery Rate | All-service OTD context. | If Express Post breaches spike but all-service OTD holds, the issue is concentrated in the priority lane, not the whole network. |
| Late Shipments | Absolute late count across all services. | Tells you how much of the total late workload is the refundable Express Post tail. |
| Exception Rate | Leading indicator. | A held-at-depot or network-impact exception on an Express Post parcel predicts a breach 12 to 24 hours later. |
| Avg Shipping Cost | The recoverable amount per breach. | Express Post unit cost is the refund value; multiply by the breach count for the weekly recovery opportunity. |
| Open Claims | Downstream of this list. | Filed refund claims show here until Australia Post resolves them. |
Cross-connector: shopify.refund_rate | Customer-facing impact. | A missed Express Post guarantee on a paid-for-speed order is the highest-refund-risk shipment you ship; breaches here predict refund requests within days. |
Reconciling against the carrier’s own dashboard
Where to look in Australia Post’s own tooling: Australia Post Business → MyPost Business → Tracking, filter to Express Post and sort by status, then cross-check against Help → Compensation and refunds for the Express Post guarantee terms. eParcel customers see the same consignment list in the eParcel Customer Centre → Tracking, and lodge refund claims through the account team or the online enquiry form. The authoritative guarantee window for any given postcode pair is the Express Post delivery network page. The closest like-for-like check is to filter Express Post, last 7 days, status not-delivered, and compare the count of past-guarantee consignments. Why our number may legitimately differ from Australia Post’s view:| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Tracking-event ingestion latency | Ours can lag delivered scans | Australia Post pushes scan events in batches; a parcel delivered 30 to 90 minutes ago may still show on our list until the delivered scan ingests. The portal can clear it first. Scan timestamps are recorded in carrier-local time at the scan location. |
| Lodgement cut-off interpretation | Either | We set the guarantee clock from the carrier lodgement scan; if the portal anchors on a different timestamp (label creation vs first network scan) the past-guarantee count can differ by the parcels lodged near cut-off. |
| Eligibility-network edge postcodes | Ours lower | We only list breaches between in-network postcodes. The portal may show a late Express Post parcel to an out-of-network destination that was never guaranteed; that is late but not refund-eligible. |
| Public-holiday calendar | Boundary days off | State public holidays (which vary by state) shift the business-day clock. A mismatch in the holiday table moves a small number of parcels across the guarantee boundary. |
| Business-day vs calendar-day counting | Ours later | Express Post counts business days; a weekend lodgement does not breach on Saturday. If a portal view counts calendar days it would flag earlier than we do. |
| Card | Expected relationship | Causes of legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
shopify.refund_rate | Downstream sentiment. | Refund rate has many drivers; a missed speed promise is a strong but not sole input. |