Skip to main content
Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier

​
At a glance

Absolute count of Evri parcels that missed their service-aim delivery date in the rolling 7-day window. Evri sells day-aim services (Standard 3-5 day, Next Day, ParcelShop), so “late” is judged against the aim-by date for that service, not a time-of-day cutoff. Each parcel that overruns its aim scores 1.

​
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.

​
Worked example

A UK DTC pet-supplies brand running Evri Standard for everyday parcels (food, toys, accessories), around 3,400 parcels per week. £30 average order value, 70 percent residential delivery. Reading taken at 09:00 BST on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 7 days (06 Mar 26 to 12 Mar 26). The card reads 225 as the headline; the alert at >5% of total is tripped at 6.6 percent. Five things to notice:
  1. The 178 Standard late parcels are the bulk of the issue. At 6.3 percent late rate the merchant is feeling the trade-off cost. Compare to a 4 percent baseline in earlier months, the additional 60 to 70 late parcels per week is the action signal.
  2. Next Day at 9.3 percent is structural for Evri, not a one-off failure. Evri’s Next Day product over-promises on the same self-employed-courier network. If the brand’s customer promise on Next Day is firm, the right action is to switch Next Day volume to Royal Mail Tracked 24 (which delivers ~95 percent on next day at higher cost). Keep Evri Standard for everyday.
  3. The 225 late parcels translate to roughly 60 to 80 customer-service tickets in the next 3 to 5 days. WISMO conversion for Evri tends to be higher than for Royal Mail because customers’ baseline expectation is “Royal Mail-tier reliability”; when Evri misses, the complaint rate is disproportionate. Pair with the merchant’s CS ticket volume metric.
  4. Geographical concentration matters. Spot-check the 178 Standard late parcels by postcode: if 60 to 80 are concentrated in two postcodes, that is a courier event in a specific round. Pair with OTD by Route. If uniform across postcodes, the issue is network-wide (weather, depot capacity).
  5. Compare against the same week last year. A 6.6 percent late rate is bad if last year’s same week was 3.5 percent (real degradation), but normal if last year’s was 6 percent. Steady-state for Evri Standard is 4 to 7 percent; treat 6.6 percent as the higher end of normal, not an emergency.

​
Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Late count is a workload metric. Pair it with these:

​
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Evri’s own portal: Evri Business Portal → Reports → Service Performance → Late Deliveries. Filter Date Range = Last 7 Days. The aggregate late-count at the top of the filtered view should reconcile with this card. Why our number may legitimately differ from Evri’s portal: Internal identity (within Evri): her_late_shipments_count = her_shipments_total - (her_shipments_total × her_otd_rate), ignoring rounding. Cross-connector reconciliation:
Documentation cross-reference (UK carrier peers).

​
Known limitations / merchant FAQs

My late count rose 50 percent week-on-week, what should I check? In order of likelihood: (1) A specific postcode courier event (single courier sick, on holiday, or quit). Check OTD by Route. (2) A weather event affected a region. Check Evri’s service updates. (3) A volume surge without proportional courier capacity, common during BFCM and Christmas. (4) A depot capacity issue, Evri occasionally consolidates depots and the cutover produces 2 to 3 weeks of disruption. (5) The merchant changed dispatch routine, late afternoon dispatches miss the same-day collection sweep and become next-day backlogs. Should I expect Evri’s late count to be higher than Royal Mail’s? Yes, structurally. Evri runs at 4 to 7 percent late steady-state; Royal Mail Tracked at 2 to 4 percent. The gap is the cost-vs-reliability trade-off. If Evri’s late count is consistently below 4 percent, the brand is getting unusually good performance; if consistently above 7 percent, the trade is no longer worth the saving. Can I claim refunds for late Evri parcels? Mostly no. Evri does not offer carriage-refund SLAs on Standard service; only Next Day has any service-credit framework, and even that is contractual rather than automatic. Lost-parcel claims (separate process) pay out at the parcel-value compensation cap, but on-time-delivery refunds are not standard practice. The cost-leader pricing assumes no service credits. How does this card interact with WISMO ticket volume? Strong lagged correlation with Evri specifically. Customers tracking an Evri parcel that does not move on the expected day produce WISMO tickets at 1.5 to 2x the rate of customers tracking a Royal Mail parcel. The reason: customer baseline expectation. Royal Mail customers absorb a 1-day delay; Evri customers, having already heard the carrier reputation, panic at the same delay. My Evri Next Day late rate is 9 percent, is this a service breakage? No. Evri Next Day’s published OTD is roughly 90 to 92 percent steady-state; a 9 percent late rate is in line with the network’s structural limits. Evri’s Next Day product runs on the same self-employed-courier rounds as Standard with priority flagging; the priority does not always survive operational pressure. For brands needing genuine next-day reliability use Royal Mail Tracked 24 or APC, not Evri Next Day. ParcelShop drop-off has lower late rate than driver-collection, why? Because ParcelShop drop-off removes the upstream collection-leg variability. The merchant deposits at the ParcelShop; Evri’s pickup courier collects from the ParcelShop on a fixed route once daily. The parcel enters the network with a predictable timing, regardless of warehouse dispatch lag. My late count includes parcels that were eventually delivered late, but the customer didn’t complain. Why count them? The card is the leading indicator. Most “delivered 1 day late” Evri parcels do not generate a complaint, but the cumulative pattern across a week predicts (a) the customer-service ticket spike at 7-14 days, (b) the refund-rate rise at 14-21 days, and (c) the customer-cohort retention dip at 60-90 days. Treat the card as an early warning, not as a complaint count. What is the right Evri late-count threshold for my brand? Depends on AOV and customer acquisition cost. For high-volume / low-AOV brands (£20-30 AOV, frequent reorder), 5 to 7 percent late is acceptable; the carriage saving outweighs the cost. For higher-AOV / single-purchase brands (£50+ AOV), 3 to 5 percent late is the limit; above that, the lifetime-value damage exceeds the carriage saving.

​
Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Late Shipments 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.