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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier
ShipTheory’s core SLA - did label generation succeed? Below 98% directly blocks order despatch and is the most actionable signal.

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At a glance

Share of label-creation API calls in the last 24 hours that returned a valid printable shipping label. The single most-actionable connector-health number for ShipTheory: when this drops below 98%, orders cannot be despatched, regardless of how healthy the underlying carriers, the warehouse, or the rate-shop ruleset are. The card surfaces problems at the boundary between Vortex IQ, ShipTheory, and the underlying UK sub-carriers.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your ShipTheory 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

The UK home & garden merchant. Reading taken at 09:00 GMT on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 24 hours. The card reads 97.7%; the alert at <98% is firing, dragged by Evri (91.0%) and Yodel (92.7%). Five things to notice:
  1. Evri’s 91% drags the aggregate by 1.9 points. 56 of 69 failures are Evri. If Evri volume rises, the aggregate drops further. Per-sub-carrier sub-tile is mandatory reading.
  2. 56 Evri failures over 24 hours = 56 orders waiting. They sit in the warehouse queue. Operational fix during Evri downtime is to override rate-shop temporarily to Royal Mail Tracked 48 (slightly higher cost) and despatch. The card is the trigger for the override.
  3. DPD and Parcelforce at near-100% are the carrier-network benchmark. If they ever drop below 99%, issue is almost certainly ShipTheory-side or your-account-side, not carrier.
  4. The 4 Royal Mail failures are noise-floor. Address-validation rejections (postcode-vs-address mismatch, common in UK with people typing post town as address line 1). They retry successfully on next attempt.
  5. 97.7% aggregate is the intervention threshold. At 97% exact, queue stall visible to despatch staff (~10 to 30 orders waiting); at 95% full operations escalation; at 90% P1. The alert at 98% is calibrated for first-detection signal, before user-visible pain.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Label-generation success is the gate; many other cards depend on it being green.

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in ShipTheory’s own dashboard: ShipTheory Account → Logs → API Calls. The page lists every API call with status, response code, error message, and sub-carrier. The closest like-for-like view is Last 24h, Type: shipment.create. ShipTheory’s status page posts platform-side outages and underlying carrier issues. Why our number may legitimately differ from ShipTheory’s portal: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why is Evri structurally less reliable than DPD? Capacity model. Evri runs on distributed self-employed-courier network with smaller sortation hubs; their API takes occasional 503 spells during high-volume Monday and pre-peak windows. DPD runs centralised in-house network with multi-region failover. Cost-vs-reliability trade is intentional in your rate-shop ruleset. The card shows 95% but our orders are still going out. Why? Retry behaviour. ShipTheory’s connector retries failed labels up to 3 times with backoff. 95% first-attempt success often resolves to 99%+ post-retry on shipment level. Operations only sees queue stall when retries also fail (5%-of-5%, 0.25% of shipments). My account is mostly Royal Mail and we still see 97%. Why? UK address validation rejections. Royal Mail OBA is strict about postcode-vs-address-line alignment; if your customer-data quality is uneven, OBA rejects. Fix is upstream address validation, not carrier change. Why 24h window and not 1h? Smoothing. Carrier APIs have transient 5xx spells (Evri mid-day, Royal Mail OBA Monday morning). 1h window alerts on noise; 24h gives enough samples. Label success rate dropped sharply, diagnosis flow? Five steps. (1) Check Days to Token Expiry. (2) Check sub-carrier sub-tile, is one carrier failing or all? (3) Check failing carrier’s status page. (4) Check audit log for failure-message distribution. (5) If unclear, contact ShipTheory support with timestamped samples. What is “ShipTheory’s core SLA”? Label-creation API is the highest-criticality endpoint; ShipTheory’s internal SLA targets 99.9% availability excluding sub-carrier-side failures. Most enterprise contracts include credits for breach. The card’s 98% threshold is the merchant-facing operational threshold. EU exports post-Brexit, failure profile? Stricter. Customs declaration data must be present; missing fields produce validation failures. EU-export lanes typically show 60 to 80% success until merchant’s order-data pipeline includes the customs fields. Read this card alongside Shipments by Destination. Royal Mail strikes, how does the card behave? Royal Mail OBA stays available even during postal strikes (the API processes label creation; couriers do not collect during strike). Card shows healthy success rate; the operational issue is downstream (manifest gap, not label gap). Watch Labels Printed Not Collected during strikes. Can I use this card to negotiate carrier contracts? Yes, indirectly. Pair with sub-carrier-specific reliability extracts; sub-carriers running materially below 99% on healthy windows lose volume in the rate-shop. Present 90-day rolling reliability per carrier from the trend view in QBR.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Label-Generation Success Rate is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across ShipTheory 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.