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Metrics type: Supporting MetricsCategory: Exceptions & Claims

At a glance

Absolute count of DHL Paket consignments in the trailing 7 days that ended in a genuine non-delivery: undeliverable (unzustellbar), refused (Annahme verweigert), or returned to sender after all attempts and retention failed. This is the subset of exceptions that actually cost a customer their parcel, not the recipient-not-home scans that self-resolve. The alert fires when failures exceed 2 percent of total shipments.

What it tracks

The card counts consignments whose final or terminal tracking status is a true failure, drawn from the DHL Parcel DE Tracking API (/track/shipments) and keyed on the Sendungsnummer, with shipment totals from the DHL Paket Shipment API. It deliberately excludes the large, benign Empfänger-nicht-angetroffen bucket that recovers via Packstation, branch (Filiale), or neighbour handover; those sit on Exception Rate. A failure here means the parcel did not reach the addressee and now needs a re-ship, a refund, or a claim. It is a count, not a rate, because the count is the workload: each failure is a support contact, a replacement order, or a Nachforschungsauftrag in the making. The 7-day window keeps it tied to this week’s despatch decisions. Failures cluster by cause: bad address data (controllable upstream via Label Generation Success), refusal on cash-on-delivery or unexpected customs charges, and unresolved holds that time out into a Rücklauf, which then appears on Returned to Sender.

Reconciling against the source

Compare against the Sendungsübersicht in the DHL Geschäftskundenportal filtered to undeliverable / returned statuses, last 7 days, outbound only. Differences are usually tracking-event ingestion lag (a failure logged minutes ago may not be in our index yet), our once-per-shipment counting versus the portal’s per-event log, and time-zone boundaries. Scan timestamps are in carrier-local German time.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Failed Deliveries is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Deutsche Post 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.