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Metrics type: Supporting MetricsCategory: Exceptions & Claims

At a glance

The count of Sendle parcels in the trailing 7 days that recorded a delivery failure: the recipient was unavailable, the address could not be located, the parcel was refused, or it was returned to sender before delivery completed. This is the deliverability-specific subset of the broader Exception Rate, the failures a customer actually felt at the door. The alert fires when failed deliveries exceed 2 percent of total parcels in the window.

What it tracks

The card counts parcels whose last-mile tracking state is a delivery failure, read from the event stream on GET /api/tracking/{sendle_reference} and the order list on GET /api/orders. It is deliberately narrower than Exception Rate: it excludes upstream events such as failed pickup and depot holds, and focuses on the delivery leg the recipient experienced (Delivery Attempted with no successful redelivery, Unable to Locate, refused, or Return to Sender triggered by a failed delivery). The 7-day window makes it a workload number: each failed delivery is roughly one customer-service contact plus a redelivery or refund decision. A failed delivery that later recovers on a second attempt still counts here for the period in which it failed, because the friction was real. Read this card alongside Exception Rate for the full transit picture, First-Attempt Delivery Rate for the inverse success view, Returned to Sender for failures that ended in a full return, and Open Claims for the subset that escalated into a cover claim. If failed deliveries spike alongside Pickup Booking Success Rate staying healthy, the problem is at the door, not the collection.

Reconciling against the source

Cross-check against the Sendle Dashboard Orders view filtered to the delivery-failure statuses for the same 7 days; allow for tracking-event ingestion latency (minutes to several hours) and carrier-local scan timestamps, which can shift a parcel near a day boundary between days.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Failed Deliveries is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Sendle 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.