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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier

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At a glance

Share of Evri parcels that threw at least one tracking exception event before final delivery. Exceptions on Evri include carded (“Attempted, no answer”), refused, address-invalid, courier no-show (“not loaded onto vehicle”), depot misroute, and the Evri-specific failure mode of ParcelShop pickup not occurring. A parcel that threw an exception but eventually delivered still counts here, the card surfaces operational friction.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Evri (formerly Hermes UK) data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A UK DTC home-fragrance brand running Evri Standard for everyday consumer parcels, around 8,400 parcels per month, mixed urban / suburban / rural delivery. Reading taken at 09:00 BST on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days (10 Feb 26 to 11 Mar 26). The card reads 3.81 percent, the alert at >3% is tripped. Five things to notice:
  1. CARDED at 2 percent dominates the count. Standard for Evri; the structurally-similar number on Royal Mail Tracked would be ~1.0 to 1.5 percent because Royal Mail’s salaried postman has a fixed local round and tends to know which houses are typically empty during the day. Evri’s rotating self-employed couriers do not build that local knowledge as efficiently. The fix is largely customer-side: add “leave with neighbour” instructions on the parcel via the Evri portal, allow customers to pre-set safe-place preferences.
  2. NOT_LOADED at 0.62 percent is the Evri-specific signal. It means a self-employed courier was scheduled to pick up the round, didn’t show, and the parcels sat at the depot until a backup courier could be assigned (next day). 0.62 percent is in line with Evri’s published baseline; above 1 percent indicates a depot-staffing crisis.
  3. PARCELSHOP_NOT_PICKED_UP at 0.25 percent is small but distinctive. This is a parcel sitting at a ParcelShop that the Evri pickup courier did not collect on the daily sweep. The fix is to identify which ParcelShops are involved (a single non-collected ParcelShop drives most of the count). Pair with ParcelShop Drop-off Failure Rate.
  4. LOST_AT_DEPOT at 0.05 percent (4 parcels) translates to lost-parcel claims. Each is a candidate for Lost-Parcel Rate. Persistent presence of LOST_AT_DEPOT is the trigger to escalate with Evri’s account team.
  5. The 3.81 percent headline is just above alert. Treat 2 to 4 percent as Evri’s normal range; above 4 percent for two weeks running is escalation territory. Rising trend is more important than absolute level.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Exception rate is a leading indicator. Pair with these:

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Evri’s own portal: Evri Business Portal → Reports → Exception Reports. Filter Date Range = Last 30 Days. The portal exposes per-event-code counts; reconcile against that breakdown. Why our number may legitimately differ from Evri’s portal: Internal identity (within Evri): her_exception_rate >= her_failed_delivery_rate. Every failed delivery threw at least one exception; most exceptions resolve via redelivery. Cross-connector reconciliation:
Documentation cross-reference (UK carrier peers).

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why is Evri’s exception rate higher than Royal Mail’s? Structural. Evri’s self-employed-courier model produces more no-shows, more turnover, and less local route knowledge than Royal Mail’s salaried postman model. Healthy steady-state is 2 to 4 percent for Evri, 1 to 2 percent for Royal Mail. The gap is part of the cost-vs-reliability trade-off. NOT_LOADED is uniquely Evri, what is it and what do I do? NOT_LOADED means a self-employed courier was scheduled to pick up a round of parcels in the morning, did not show up, and the parcels sat at the depot until a backup courier could be assigned (typically next day). It produces a 24-hour delay on every parcel in that round. The merchant cannot fix it directly; if the rate exceeds 1 percent, escalate with Evri’s account team about depot-level courier-staffing. Should I expect higher exceptions during winter months? Yes. November to February typically run 30-50 percent higher exception rates on Evri than the rest of the year. Causes: weather-related courier no-shows, BFCM and Christmas volume saturation, courier turnover (self-employed couriers leave the network at higher rates over the festive period). Plan for a 1 to 2 point exception-rate rise from late October through early February. My ADDRESS_INVALID rate spiked, what happened? Almost always upstream. Either (a) the merchant launched a campaign that produced rushed customer signups with typo-laden addresses, (b) a CSV import of orders skipped address validation, or (c) Shopify checkout’s address-validation library was disabled or downgraded. Spot-check 10 ADDRESS_INVALID parcels: if the same typo pattern recurs, the cause is a single upstream change. Can I tell which exceptions are courier-fault vs customer-fault? Mostly yes from the code: NOT_LOADED, MISROUTE, LOST_AT_DEPOT, DAMAGED_IN_TRANSIT are courier-side; CARDED, REFUSED, ADDRESS_INVALID are mostly customer-side; PARCELSHOP_NOT_PICKED_UP is courier-side. Use this split when escalating with Evri’s account team, exclude customer-fault exceptions from the conversation. My exception rate is 4 percent but my OTD is 94 percent, what does that mean? Evri’s redelivery network is absorbing about half the exception friction. Roughly 50 to 70 percent of CARDED parcels eventually deliver successfully on next attempt within the aim window. The structural shape: exception rate is roughly 2x the OTD-miss rate. ParcelShop-related exceptions are my biggest issue, can I move away from ParcelShop drop-off? Yes. Switch from ParcelShop drop-off to driver-collection (Evri offers a courier collection service for high-volume merchants). Driver collection has lower exception rate (~2 percent) than ParcelShop (~3 to 5 percent depending on which shops). The cost difference is small. Why are LOST_AT_DEPOT exceptions a separate concern? Because they almost always become claims. A parcel last-scanned at depot 7+ days ago without further events is operationally lost. Pair with Lost-Parcel Rate. Persistent LOST_AT_DEPOT presence is the trigger to renegotiate or switch carrier.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Exception Rate is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Evri (formerly Hermes UK) 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.