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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier

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At a glance

Share of Evri (formerly Hermes UK) parcels that arrived at the addressee on or before the contracted delivery date for the chosen service. Evri operates a self-employed-courier last-mile network at lower cost than Royal Mail or DPD, so the trade-off is generally lower OTD in exchange for materially lower per-parcel cost. Brands using Evri have explicitly accepted that trade; this card measures whether the trade is holding up.

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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 clothing brand with high-volume, low-AOV traffic (£28 average order), around 14,000 Evri Standard parcels per month. Brand uses Evri because per-parcel cost (~~£2.10) is roughly 40 percent lower than Royal Mail Tracked 48 (~~£3.50) on the same parcel size. 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 93.3 percent on the dial, the alert at <95% is tripped. Five things to notice:
  1. The 93.3 percent is structurally below the 95 percent alert threshold, but for Evri this is healthy. The headline benchmark for Evri is 91-94 percent; the 95 percent threshold imported from generic shipping-archetype defaults is too tight for Evri specifically. Action: tune the connector threshold to 92 percent for this carrier; treat 93.3 percent as healthy steady-state, not as an active incident.
  2. The cost story is the whole point. The same merchant on Royal Mail Tracked 48 would see roughly 96 to 97 percent OTD at £3.50 per parcel. Evri at 93 percent costs £2.20. On 14,000 parcels per month that is £18,200 per month carriage saving in exchange for a roughly 4-point OTD gap. The merchant has explicitly chosen this trade-off; the question is not “fix the OTD” but “is the cost saving still worth it for our customer base”.
  3. ParcelShop drop-off at 95.8 percent overperforms. The merchant drop-off model removes the upstream collection-leg variability; the parcel enters the network already scanned at the ParcelShop. This is the single most reliable Evri service tier for merchants who can route packages through the ParcelShop network. Pair with ParcelShop Drop-off Failure Rate.
  4. Next Day at 91.8 percent is the worst tier. Evri’s Next Day product is structurally over-promised for the network; their self-employed-courier model is not built for time-definite delivery. Brands that need genuine next-day reliability should use Royal Mail Tracked 24 or APC, not Evri Next Day. The 91.8 percent here is roughly the published Evri Next Day benchmark; not a service breakage.
  5. The “rate suddenly degraded” debug case. A 4 to 8 point sudden drop on Evri is often a single-postcode courier turnover event. A courier going on holiday, getting sick, or quitting can leave a postcode under-served for 1 to 2 weeks until the depot reallocates the round. Pair with OTD by Route to localise. A network-wide drop is unusual for Evri; their 2022 rebrand did not change the operational model.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Evri OTD must be read in the cost context. Pair it 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 → Service Performance. Filter Date Range = Last 30 Days, Service = All. The aggregate OTD displayed at the top of the filtered view is what should reconcile with this card. For account-managed customers, Evri’s monthly performance report from the account team includes a per-postcode-area breakdown plus failure-cause attribution. Why our number may legitimately differ from Evri’s portal: Internal identity (within Evri): her_late_shipments_count = her_shipments_total × (1 - her_otd_rate), ignoring rounding and in-transit treatment. Cross-connector reconciliation:
Documentation cross-reference (UK carrier peers).

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why is Evri’s OTD lower than Royal Mail’s? Structural. Evri’s last-mile is run by self-employed couriers paid per parcel; Royal Mail’s is run by salaried employees on contracted rounds. The self-employed model gives Evri a cost advantage but produces more volatility: courier illness, holidays, turnover, and bad weather affect performance more directly. The trade-off is explicit: lower OTD in exchange for materially lower per-parcel cost. For a high-volume / low-AOV brand the trade is usually worth it; for a premium brand it is not. Should I switch from Evri to Royal Mail? Maths-driven decision. Multiply the volume × cost-per-parcel difference (typically £1.30 to £1.80 per parcel) to get monthly carriage saving. Then estimate the customer-lifetime cost of the OTD gap (3 to 5 percentage points), refunds, goodwill credits, and the share of late-delivery customers who do not reorder. For a brand at £25 AOV, the carriage saving usually outweighs the OTD cost. For £80+ AOV, Royal Mail is often the right call. My Evri OTD just dropped 6 points in a single postcode area, what happened? Almost certainly a courier event. (1) Self-employed courier off sick / on holiday / quit, the depot reallocates the round to backup couriers who don’t know the local addresses; OTD drops for 1 to 2 weeks until reallocation stabilises. (2) A new courier started, learning the round adds 30 to 90 seconds per stop initially. (3) Local depot capacity issue, Evri occasionally consolidates depots, and the cutover produces 2 to 3 weeks of disruption. The 2022 rebrand was supposed to fix Evri, why is OTD still volatile? The rebrand changed branding, not operations. Evri’s last-mile model is the same as Hermes UK’s; OTD trends through the rebrand were continuous. The rebrand did succeed in reputation rehabilitation (search interest, customer surveys) but the operational model that produces the cost-vs-OTD trade-off is unchanged. Some customers still subjectively distrust Evri based on Hermes-era experiences from 2018-2021. My customer says the parcel was “delivered to safe place” but they can’t find it, what happened? Three possibilities. (1) The driver dropped at the wrong house, the photo evidence shows a doorstep that isn’t the customer’s. (2) The “safe place” was visible from the street and the parcel was stolen before the customer got home. (3) The driver scanned “delivered” without delivering, rare but reported, especially with newer self-employed couriers gaming pay-per-parcel KPIs. Pull the photo evidence first and check the address; that resolves 70 percent of cases. The remaining 30 percent are insurance / refund cases. Why do my Evri Next Day parcels miss aim more than Standard parcels? Evri’s Next Day product is structurally over-promised. The network is built for next-3-to-5-day delivery; the Next Day uplift uses the same couriers and the same routing, just flagged as priority. If a courier has 80 parcels for a round, the 12 Next Day parcels do not always get prioritised. For genuine next-day reliability, use Royal Mail Tracked 24 or APC NextDay-12; Evri Next Day is best treated as “expedited Standard” rather than a true Next Day SLA. ParcelShop drop-off has a different OTD pattern, why? The merchant drops the parcel at a ParcelShop (a small convenience store partner of Evri) rather than waiting for courier collection. Evri’s collection courier picks up from the ParcelShop (typically once daily) and the parcel enters the network already scanned. This removes the upstream-collection variability and gives ParcelShop drop-offs slightly higher OTD than driver-collected Standard. Pair with ParcelShop Drop-off Failure Rate. My OTD is being dragged down by Highlands and Islands traffic, what should I do? Either (a) accept the regional variance, the Highlands customer expects slightly slower delivery and is rarely the source of WISMO complaints, or (b) switch H&I traffic to Royal Mail (Royal Mail’s universal-service obligation includes H&I at parity rates with mainland) while keeping Evri for mainland. The second option is what most multi-carrier brands do. How does Evri compare to DPD on OTD? DPD typically runs 94 to 96 percent OTD at £6.50 to £8.50 per parcel; Evri runs 91 to 94 percent at £2.05 to £3.75. DPD is the premium-courier choice; Evri is the cost-leader. The middle-ground choice is Royal Mail Tracked 48, 96 to 97 percent at £3.50.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

On-Time Delivery 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.