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Metrics type: Cross-Platform MetricsCategory: Shipping & Courier
For every late shipment - was the delay at the warehouse (ShipBob picked late) or on the carrier (DPDLocal in transit)? Key Metric.

At a glance

For every late DPDLocal parcel, attributes the delay either to the warehouse (ShipBob or other 3PL picked / dispatched the parcel late) or to the carrier (DPDLocal kept the parcel longer in transit than the promised carrier-transit-time). Stops the warehouse-vs-carrier finger-pointing with hard numbers.

Calculation

Calculated automatically from your DPDLocal 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 DTC apparel merchant using ShipBob’s UK Bristol DC + DPDLocal NextDay. ~9,000 parcels per month. Reading 12 Mar 26, trailing 30 days, 280 late shipments out of 9,000. Card flags carrier-share at 60%, exactly at the alert threshold. Three things to notice:
  1. The conversation stops being “ShipBob’s fault” or “DPDLocal’s fault”, both have evidence. Without this card, the warehouse and carrier teams blame each other; with it, the merchant has hard numbers for both QBRs.
  2. 60% carrier-share is the renegotiation trigger. This is the right time to push DPDLocal for service-credit allowances, route adjustments, or to evaluate a parallel UK courier (Royal Mail Tracked, Evri, Yodel) for postcode areas where DPD is structurally slow.
  3. 31% warehouse-share is a staffing or capacity issue at ShipBob. ShipBob’s per-DC capacity ramps for BFCM but commonly stays staffed at the post-peak baseline through January, exposing a gap in February when a brand promotion drives volume. Pair with SLA Compliance by Warehouse.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in DPDLocal’s dashboard: DPDLocal does not produce this attribution split natively, the carrier only sees its own leg. The 3PL produces its own SLA report (ShipBob Merchant Portal → Performance) which shows the warehouse leg. This Vortex IQ card is the only join. Why your manual calc may differ: Cross-connector reconciliation:

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

The card disappeared. Why? The only_when: has_shipbob_sibling condition went false, ShipBob (or the equivalent 3PL connector) was disconnected or its data flow stalled. Re-check the ShipBob connector health. My 3PL is not ShipBob. Will the card still work? Currently the join is hard-coded to ShipBob. The card framework supports any 3PL with dispatch timestamps; adding Veeqo, Mintsoft, ShipHero, or in-house WMS support is a connector roadmap item. If the merchant has a custom WMS export, manual import via the connector field-mapper can populate the equivalent dispatch timestamp. Carrier-share is at 70% but my account team says they hit 99% transit time. Who’s right? Both can be right. DPDLocal’s “transit time” report measures depot-to-delivery; this card measures handoff-to-delivery. The gap is the depot-receive-to-depot-out leg, which DPD often does not surface in their report but counts in this card. Show your account team the dispatch_to_delivery_hrs distribution to ground the conversation. What if the warehouse is fast but the carrier still hits the SLA, does this card still flag warehouse-share? No. The card only attributes when the parcel is late overall. A fast warehouse + slow carrier that still meets the customer-promise contributes nothing to either share. Should I switch carriers if carrier-share is high? Maybe, after evaluating. Three steps. (1) Check whether the carrier-share is concentrated in specific UK postcode areas using OTD by Route; a regional fix may be faster. (2) Renegotiate before switching, the carrier has commercial leverage when you have evidence. (3) If switching is the decision, run a 4-week parallel test on a subset of postcodes to validate the new carrier on your specific route mix before full migration.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

3PL vs Carrier Delay Attribution is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across DPDLocal 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.