At a glance
Absolute count of DPDLocal parcels that delivered after their promised date in the trailing 7 days. The numerator-side counter on the OTD relationship; rises before the OTD percentage moves on a growing merchant. Used as the daily-triage queue length for CS and operations.
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-based health-supplements brand on Shopify, ~700 DPDLocal parcels per week mostly on NextDay. Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 7 days (5 Mar to 11 Mar 26).
The card reads 26. The alert at
>5% of total is not tripped (3.7%). Three things to notice:
- Friday is the bad day. 8 late on the highest-volume day suggests the Thursday-evening collection or the Friday-morning sortation is the bottleneck. Pair with Failed Pickup Rate to confirm.
- The CS queue has 26 late parcels to chase. At ~1.5 contacts each, that is 30 to 45 CS tickets this week directly traceable to this list. Pre-emptive outreach (auto-email “we know your parcel is late, here is the new ETA”) cuts inbound by 40 to 60%.
- 3.7% under a 5% alert threshold is healthy but worth watching. A persistent climb from 1.5% to 3.7% over four weeks would precede an OTD warn at the 30-day window. Treat the trajectory of this card as the early-warning signal.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Late Shipments is a daily operational queue. Pair with these to triage and quantify impact:Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in DPDLocal’s own dashboard: MyDPD Business Portal → Tracking → Filter “Late deliveries”, Last 7 days. Each row showsexpectedDeliveryDate, actualDeliveryDate, and the gap. The portal also exposes a downloadable CSV per filter.
Why our number may legitimately differ from MyDPD:
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why does the count look different from the OTD percentage? This card is a count; OTD is a rate. On a growing merchant, the count rises naturally even as the rate stays flat (more total parcels means more late ones at the same percentage). Use this card for daily triage and CS staffing; use OTD Rate for trend and SLA conversations. A late parcel that eventually delivers, does it stay in this card forever? No, only while it falls within the rolling 7-day window starting from the day it actually delivered. After the window rolls past, it leaves the count. The card always reads “parcels that delivered late in the last 7 days”. My count spiked but OTD did not. What gives? Two usual reasons. (1) You shipped more parcels. A 30% volume increase week-over-week with constant OTD lifts the count by 30%. (2) Window edge effect. A small late-Friday cluster from last week may have rolled out of the window today; whichever bucket has more late deliveries dominates the snapshot. Why is the count on the count card lower than the absolute number of late tracking events I see? The card counts consignments that have actually delivered (actualDeliveryDate IS NOT NULL) and were past their promise. In-flight overdue parcels are not yet counted; they are held in Parcels In Flight. When they deliver, they enter this card.
Is a parcel that the customer refused counted as late?
No. Customer refusal terminates the consignment as FAILED or REFUSED; it never reaches DELIVERED. It does not count here. It does count in Failed Deliveries.
Should I send pre-emptive “parcel late” emails to the customers on this list?
Almost always yes. Pre-emptive outreach cuts inbound CS contacts by 40 to 60% and lifts NPS even on the late cohort by 5 to 8 points (customers who feel kept-informed forgive lateness more readily). Klaviyo or Dotdigital can drive this; the trigger is a Vortex IQ webhook on this card.
The Friday spike repeats every week. Why?
Two structural patterns common to UK shippers. (1) Thursday-evening collection volume vs Friday capacity. If your inbound volume to DPDLocal peaks on Thursday but DPDLocal’s Friday-morning sortation is at capacity from other merchants, your parcels miss the cutoff. Negotiate an earlier collection slot. (2) Predict-window misses on Friday afternoons. Drivers running behind on Friday afternoons miss 30-min slots; pair with Predict Slot Accuracy to confirm.