At a glance
Share of Sendle parcels that arrived at the recipient on or before the upper bound of Sendle’s quoted ETA window for that zone. Sendle is a single-courier flat-rate service with predictable zone-based promises (AU metro 1 to 2 days, AU regional 2 to 5 days, AU remote 4 to 8 days, US metro 1 to 3 days, US ground 3 to 8 days), so unlike multi-carrier orchestrators there is one promise per zone and no rate-shop noise. The simplicity is the point: a falling rate is almost always either zone-mix shifting or Sendle’s contracted couriers (Couriers Please, Aramex, USPS partners) hitting capacity.
| What it counts | COUNT(parcels WHERE actual_delivery_date <= eta_max) / COUNT(parcels WHERE delivered_at IS NOT NULL) over the trailing 30 days. Each parcel is judged against the ETA window stored on its own booking record. |
| Delivery success criterion | Sendle marks a parcel delivered once the contracted courier records POD: signature on AU metro and most US lanes, photo-on-doorstep for AU residential and US ground, scan-only on some regional metro lanes. Statuses delivery_failed, unable_to_deliver, awaiting_collection keep the parcel out of both numerator and denominator until terminal status arrives. |
| On-time threshold | The upper bound of the Sendle-quoted ETA window at booking time, no grace. Each parcel carries its own zone-promise; the card does not apply a flat house SLA. |
| Returns / RTO | Outbound only. Sendle’s RTS flow appears in Returned to Sender, not here. Failed-and-eventually-delivered parcels count as late if they exceed the promise window. |
| Service level scope | All Sendle services pooled (Standard, Pro, Saver). Most accounts run a single tier; the card is service-tier-aware via the per-parcel ETA. Per-zone breakdown lives in OTD by Route. |
| Carbon-neutrality | Sendle is 100 percent carbon-neutral by default. The carbon claim is independent of OTD; a falling rate does not change the offset accounting. |
| Currency | Not applicable, this is a rate. |
| Time window | 30D vsP (rolling 30 days vs the prior 30). Daily readings exist but are noisy below 200 parcels per day. |
| Alert trigger | <95% (warn) / <90% (critical), driven by sentiment_key: otd_rate. AU DTC benchmark is 92 to 96 percent on metro-heavy mixes; sub-90 percent typically means remote-zone share has surged or a contracted courier is degraded. |
| Roles | owner, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Sendle data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
An Australian DTC home-goods brand using Sendle Standard for nationwide delivery. Reading taken at 09:00 AEDT on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days (10 Feb 26 to 11 Mar 26).| Zone | Parcels | Delivered on or before ETA upper bound | OTD Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| AU Metro (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth) | 6,840 | 6,580 | 96.2% |
| AU Regional (Tier-2 cities, Newcastle, Geelong, Wollongong) | 2,340 | 2,098 | 89.7% |
| AU Remote (NT, regional WA, Tasmania, FNQ) | 980 | 706 | 72.0% |
| All zones (this card) | 10,160 | 9,384 | 92.4% |
<95% warn is firing but the <90% critical floor is not. Five things to notice that are specific to Sendle and the AU/US flat-rate model:
- Remote-zone share is the lever, not Sendle’s network. AU Remote at 72 percent OTD on 10 percent of volume drags the headline by ~3 points. Sendle’s quoted ETAs for Remote (4 to 8 days) already assume best-case courier handover via Couriers Please regional partners; in practice 25 to 35 percent of remote parcels exceed the upper bound during normal weeks. There is no rate-shop lever inside Sendle; the operational responses are (a) widen checkout copy on remote postcodes (“4 to 10 days”), (b) absorb the OTD hit as the cost of carbon-neutral nationwide coverage, or (c) supplement with Australia Post Express for remote orders.
- Metro at 96.2 percent is healthy and competitive. Sendle’s metro service performance sits within 1 to 2 points of Australia Post Parcel Post and StarTrack standard for the same lanes. The 80 percent of typical AU DTC volume that ships metro is the structural reason most Sendle accounts hold 92 to 95 percent overall.
- The 92.4 percent reading on a Tuesday in early March is normal seasonality. AU Q1 (Feb to early Apr) is Sendle’s most stable window. Q4 / pre-Christmas typically lifts AU Remote late share to 35 to 45 percent because Sendle’s contracted couriers hit capacity; pre-baseline customer-facing copy and despatch cutoffs by mid-November.
- Flat-rate pricing does not protect OTD; it protects predictability. Sendle’s value proposition is “one rate per zone, carbon-neutral, no surprise surcharges”. OTD is what it is. Unlike ShippyPro or ShipTheory where the operator can shift volume to a faster carrier when this card dips, Sendle merchants either accept the trade or move some volume off-platform.
- Ad-blockers and tag-fire have nothing to do with this number. Some operators reach for “the OTD calc must be wrong” when they see 92 percent. Sendle’s tracking webhook is server-to-server; every booked parcel that delivers gets a POD scan recorded. The number is the number; act on it rather than challenge it.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
OTD rate is the customer-facing outcome metric. For Sendle the diagnostic playbook is short because the carrier is fixed; the levers are zone-mix and checkout copy, not rate-shop.| Card | Why pair it with OTD Rate | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Late Shipments | The absolute count behind the percentage. | A 92 percent OTD on 10,000 parcels = 800 late deliveries = 800 customer-service tickets in flight. The percentage feels recoverable; the count is the real workload. |
| OTD by Route | The zone-by-zone breakdown that drives the headline. | Identifies whether the dip is metro (rare and serious), regional (mix-shift), or remote (structural). Most diagnostic value. |
| Avg Transit (days) | Companion timing metric. | OTD falling + avg transit rising = couriers are slowing on the routes. OTD falling + avg transit flat = ETA quotes were tight at booking; widen checkout copy. |
| Exception Rate | Leading indicator for OTD drops. | Climbing exception rate predicts a 2 to 5 day OTD dip. |
| Failed Deliveries | Failed-and-eventually-delivered parcels count as late. | Failed climb tracking OTD drop = recipient/address quality issue, not network. |
| Returned to Sender | Alternative outcome for non-delivery. | RTO climb without OTD recovery = network is dropping parcels (theft hot-spots, capacity pressure). |
| Shipments by Destination | Geographic mix view. | Customer-base geography moving regional or remote = OTD softening even with no network change. |
Cross-connector: shopify.unfulfilled_orders | Upstream pressure. | Slow Shopify-to-Sendle handoff compresses transit time and lowers OTD. |
Cross-connector: shopify.refund_rate | Downstream impact. | A 3 to 5 point OTD drop typically precedes a 0.5 to 1.5 point refund-rate climb at 7 to 14 days. |
Cross-connector: shipbob.sb_otd_rate | Adjacent 3PL OTD when ShipBob handles the warehouse leg and Sendle handles last-mile (rare; most Sendle accounts pick-pack in-house). | Different populations of shipments; useful for an agency running both, not a like-for-like reconciliation. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Sendle’s own dashboard: Sendle Dashboard → Reports → Delivery Performance. The page exposes the same OTD rate plus a zone-by-zone breakdown. The closest like-for-like view is Last 30 Days, All Services, By Zone. Sendle also publishes the underlying parcel-level CSV export witheta_min, eta_max, delivered_at, useful for spot-checking the on-time judgement.
Why our number may legitimately differ from Sendle’s portal:
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Sync lag on the most recent 6 to 24h | Ours lower briefly | Sendle’s tracking webhook posts POD events in near-real-time but our 30-day window includes parcels still in-flight at the boundary; the portal recomputes overnight against terminal status. The gap closes within 24 hours. |
| ETA-window definition | Tiny | Sendle’s portal uses the upper bound of the quoted window; the card matches that. Some third-party shipping dashboards use the midpoint or lower bound and produce different numbers. |
| Re-estimated ETAs during in-transit events | Ours stricter | If Sendle’s contracted courier issues a re-estimated delivery date mid-transit (typical during weather events), Sendle’s portal may judge against the re-estimate. Vortex IQ judges against the original promise stored at booking. |
| Time zone | Boundary days | Sendle uses workspace timezone (AEDT for AU accounts, US-Eastern for US accounts) for daily aggregation; we use UTC for cross-connector arithmetic. The 30-day window absorbs this; daily readings can shift by one day. |
| Excluded statuses | Either | Cancelled bookings and parcels still pre-collection (no first scan) are excluded from both numerator and denominator; the portal’s default view sometimes includes them as “not yet on-time” which depresses its rate by 0.3 to 0.8 points. |
| Carrier-reported vs Sendle-reported delivery date | Tiny | For US ground via USPS partners, the courier’s delivery scan and Sendle’s normalised delivered_at can differ by a few hours; the card uses Sendle’s normalised value. |
sen.otd_rate = 1 - (sen.late_shipments_count / sen.shipments_total) over the same window.
If the two cards do not satisfy this within ~0.5 percent on the same day, the cause is one of: (a) the late count uses 7D while OTD uses 30D, (b) status filtering differs (one card includes pending-RTO parcels the other excludes), (c) sync timing across the two reads. None are bugs; they are window boundaries.
Cross-connector reconciliation. Australia Post / StarTrack vs Sendle:
If you run both Sendle and Australia Post in parallel for different parcel types (low-value via Sendle, high-value via AusPost Express), do not average their OTD rates. They are different populations on different lane economics:
- Sendle’s contracted couriers (Couriers Please, Aramex regional) target a different cost-quality point than AusPost Parcel Post or StarTrack premium.
- AusPost Express Post targets 95 to 98 percent metro OTD at materially higher cost.
- Compare each carrier to the same merchant’s historical baseline for that carrier and that zone, not to each other.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why is my Sendle OTD rate dropping? Three usual causes, in order of likelihood:- Customer-base geography is shifting regional or remote. A successful regional-VIC or regional-NSW marketing campaign, B2B accounts ordering bulk to country addresses, or seasonal customer expansion all pull volume into higher-zone parcels with structurally lower OTD. Open OTD by Route to confirm.
- Sendle’s contracted couriers are at capacity. Q4 / pre-Christmas peak in AU and US holiday peak both routinely lift remote-zone late share to 35 to 45 percent. Couriers Please regional and Aramex partners hit capacity around mid-November in AU and Black Friday in US. Plan checkout copy ahead.
- A regional courier issue (industrial action, fleet outage, weather event). Sendle absorbs these silently because their value proposition is “you do not need to know which courier”; the OTD card surfaces the symptom. If a major weather event is in the news (cyclone in QLD/NT, ice storm in US), expect a 5 to 10 point dip on the affected zone for 5 to 7 days.
- Widen checkout copy on remote postcodes. Shoppers who expect “4 to 10 days” are not late at day 7; shoppers who expect “2 to 4 days” feel late at day 5. The operational OTD does not change but the customer-perceived experience improves materially. This is the single highest-leverage change for most Sendle accounts.
- Move high-value remote parcels to Australia Post Express or StarTrack. Sendle’s flat-rate works best for low-to-mid-value parcels where the cost saving justifies the OTD trade. For parcels above AUD 200 going to remote, AusPost Express adds AUD 8 to 15 per parcel and lifts OTD on those parcels by 15 to 25 points.
- Tighten despatch cutoffs internally. A parcel booked Friday 16:00 enters Sendle’s network Monday morning. Bringing your Friday cutoff to 13:00 gives Sendle the Friday afternoon collection window and shaves a day off remote ETAs.
- Audit address quality at checkout. Address-validation tools (Loqate, AddressFinder for AU) reduce failed-delivery and re-attempt cycles by 30 to 50 percent. Failed deliveries that eventually deliver still count as late on this card.
- Run a quarterly Sendle account review with their partnerships team. They occasionally surface lane-specific service updates (new metro zones, capacity expansions) that can lift OTD on specific routes. Most merchants never have this conversation; the ones who do typically see 1 to 3 point lifts on targeted lanes.