At a glance
The count of orders that were not handed to Australia Post within the despatch promise you set at checkout. This is a warehouse-floor metric, not a carrier metric: it measures the time from order-paid to first AusPost scan, the window you control. An order can dispatch late and still arrive on time, but a late dispatch is the single most controllable cause of a missed customer promise.
| What it counts | COUNT(orders WHERE first_auspost_scan_at - order_paid_at > dispatch_sla) over the rolling 7-day window. One row per order, scored against that order’s own despatch promise (same-day cut-off, next-business-day, or your configured handling time). |
| Data source | Order-paid timestamp from your store platform (Shopify / BigCommerce / Adobe order webhook). First AusPost scan (“Shipment information received” or first physical lodgement scan) from the AusPost Shipping & Tracking API GET /shipping/v1/track. The card joins on the order’s article ID / tracking number. |
| SLA definition | The despatch promise is your configured handling time per service or per channel: same-day if ordered before the cut-off, otherwise next business day, measured in AusPost lodgement business days, skipping weekends and Australian public holidays. |
| First scan, not label print | The clock stops on the first AusPost physical scan (lodgement / “received by Australia Post”), not on label generation. A label printed but never lodged is a missed dispatch, not an on-time one. This is deliberate: the customer’s parcel has not moved until AusPost has it. |
| Time window | 7D vsP (rolling 7 days, compared with the prior 7 days). Short window because despatch is an operational metric you fix this week, not a quarterly trend. |
| Alert trigger | >0 orders breached. Any missed-dispatch order fires. The promise you sold at checkout has a zero tolerance: one late despatch is one customer who was told a date you did not hit. |
| Roles | owner, operations, fulfilment |
Calculation
For each order in the 7-day window the card computes the despatch elapsed time as the difference between the first AusPost scan timestamp and the order-paid timestamp, both converted to AusPost lodgement business time (AEST / AEDT, weekends and national public holidays excluded). It compares that elapsed time against the order’s despatch SLA:is_breached = (first_auspost_scan_at - order_paid_at) > dispatch_sla_business_window
Orders with no first scan yet are handled conservatively: an order paid more than its SLA window ago with still no AusPost scan is counted as breached (the parcel has demonstrably not been lodged in time), while an order still inside its SLA window with no scan is in-flight and not counted. The card returns the breach count plus the period-over-period delta so you can see whether despatch discipline is improving or slipping week to week.
Because the clock stops on the first carrier scan rather than label print, the metric isolates the part of the journey you own (pick, pack, lodge) from the part AusPost owns (transit). A high count here points at the warehouse: cut-off times missed, carrier collection not turning up, label printed but parcel left on the bench. It does not point at AusPost transit performance, which lives on On-Time Delivery Rate and Avg Transit (days).
Worked example
A Sydney DTC apparel brand, around 1,100 orders a week, despatch promise of “order by 1pm AEST for same-day lodgement, otherwise next business day”, AusPost Parcel Post default with Express Post offered at checkout. Reading taken at 09:00 AEST on Mon 20 Apr 26 for the trailing 7 days (Mon 13 Apr 26 to Sun 19 Apr 26).| Day | Orders | Dispatched on time | Missed dispatch | Dominant cause |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 13 Apr | 168 | 166 | 2 | Late afternoon picking backlog |
| Tue 14 Apr | 191 | 191 | 0 | — |
| Wed 15 Apr | 175 | 170 | 5 | Carrier collection no-show |
| Thu 16 Apr | 182 | 181 | 1 | Single oversize awaiting repack |
| Fri 17 Apr | 204 | 196 | 8 | Cut-off missed, Friday volume spike |
| Sat 18 Apr | 96 | 96 | 0 | — |
| Sun 19 Apr | 84 | 81 | 3 | Printed Sunday, no Sunday lodgement |
| Week | 1,100 | 1,081 | 19 | — |
+58% vsP). The alert is tripped (it trips on anything above zero). Five things to notice:
- 19 orders is 19 broken promises. Each one was sold a despatch date at checkout that was not met. At an apparel AOV around 1,615 of revenue exposed to “where is my order” tickets, refund requests and review risk, before any goodwill spend. The count is the workload, not just a percentage.
- The Wednesday five is the carrier, not the warehouse. A collection no-show means the parcels were packed and labelled on time but AusPost did not turn up to collect. That is a different fix (escalate the booked collection with your AusPost account, or switch to Post Office / Parcel Locker lodgement as a fallback) to the Friday cut-off miss, which is a staffing-against-volume fix.
- Friday is the structural problem. Eight of nineteen misses landed on the highest-volume day because the 1pm cut-off was missed under load. This is the recurring DTC pattern: the promise is set for an average day and breaks on the peak day. Either staff Friday afternoons harder or move the Friday cut-off earlier and say so at checkout.
- The Sunday three are a promise-design fault, not an ops fault. AusPost does not lodge on Sundays for this merchant, so a “next business day” order placed Saturday cannot scan until Monday. If checkout copy implied Sunday despatch, fix the copy, not the warehouse. The metric is doing its job by surfacing the mismatch.
- Dispatch late does not mean delivered late. Some of these 19 will still arrive within the customer’s expected window because AusPost transit had slack. That does not make them not-breached: you missed the despatch promise you sold. Pair with Late Shipments to see how many late dispatches actually converted into late deliveries.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Dispatch SLA is the part of the journey you control. Pair it with these to separate warehouse causes from carrier causes:| Card | Why pair it with Orders with Carrier Dispatch SLA Missed | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Late Shipments | The delivered-late count downstream of dispatch. | How many late dispatches actually became late deliveries. If dispatch misses but deliveries hold, AusPost transit is absorbing your slack; if both spike, the failure compounds. |
| On-Time Delivery Rate | The carrier-transit half of the promise. | Splits “we shipped late” from “the carrier was slow”. A healthy OTD with rising dispatch misses means the problem is firmly on your floor. |
| Express Post Next-Business-Day OTD | Premium orders have the tightest dispatch window. | A missed dispatch on an Express order is the most expensive kind: it can void the next-business-day guarantee and the refund clause. |
| Express Post SLA Breach (refund-clause trigger) | Where a late dispatch becomes a refundable miss. | Confirms whether a dispatch miss on Express crossed into automatic-refund territory. |
| Label Print Failures Spike | A common upstream cause of dispatch misses. | If label generation failed at 11am, the parcels could not be lodged by 1pm. A label spike predicts a dispatch-miss spike same day. |
| Shipments with Tracking-Event Gap >24h (domestic) / >5d (intl) | Detects the “labelled but never lodged” case. | A first-scan that never arrives is both a dispatch miss here and a tracking gap there. |
| Avg Transit (days) | The transit clock that starts after dispatch. | Long transit plus late dispatch is the worst combination for the customer; budget extra checkout buffer when both run hot. |
Reconciling against the source
Where to look in the carrier’s own tooling: The despatch clock has two ends and two sources. The order-paid end lives in your store admin (Shopify Orders, BigCommerce Orders, Adobe Commerce Sales). The first-scan end lives in Australia Post MyPost Business or the AusPost tracking portal, where the first event is “Shipment information received by Australia Post” (the manifest / electronic lodgement) followed by the first physical lodgement scan. The card stops the clock on the first physical scan, not the electronic-manifest event, because the manifest can be created hours before the parcel actually moves. To reproduce a single order: take its paid time from the store, find its article on the AusPost portal, read the first physical scan timestamp, subtract weekends and AU public holidays, and compare against your configured handling time. The AusPost portal shows scan timestamps in carrier-local time (AEST / AEDT), so a parcel scanned at 00:30 AEST sits on the previous UTC day in our index. Why our number may legitimately differ from the carrier’s view:| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Manifest event vs physical scan | Ours can read higher | If you reconcile against the electronic “information received” event, you will see an earlier time than the card, which waits for the first physical lodgement scan. Manifest-only parcels that never physically lodged are breaches we catch and the manifest view hides. |
| Tracking-event ingestion lag | Ours can lag | AusPost pushes tracking events in batches; lag is typically minutes to a couple of hours, longer at peak. A parcel lodged 20 minutes ago may not yet show a first scan in our index, so a borderline order can flip from in-flight to breached as the scan lands. |
| AEST/AEDT vs UTC | Boundary days off | The card computes business-day windows in carrier-local time but stores raw timestamps in UTC. Daylight-saving transitions and the midnight boundary can shift a small number of orders by a day; over 7 days this is well under the breach signal. |
| Public-holiday calendar | Either | The card uses the national AU public-holiday calendar. State-only holidays (for example a state show day) are not lodgement days for that state’s depot but are normal elsewhere; a state-only holiday can make the card read a breach the carrier would consider on time, or vice versa. Configure your lodgement state to correct this. |
| Handling-time config drift | Either | If your configured despatch SLA in the connector does not match the promise actually shown at checkout, the card scores against the configured value. Keep the two in sync. |
| Card | Expected relationship | Causes of legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
shopify.fulfilment_delay_alert | Upstream peer. Shopify’s delay alert fires on paid-to-fulfilled (label print); this card runs paid-to-first-scan. | Shopify can mark fulfilled on label print while the parcel sits unlodged; the gap between the two is exactly the “labelled but not lodged” failure this card catches and Shopify’s metric misses. |
shopify.unfulfilled_orders | Leading indicator. | A backlog of unfulfilled orders today predicts dispatch misses tomorrow. |