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Metrics type: Supporting Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier

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At a glance

Share of calls Vortex IQ makes to the Shippo API that fail (HTTP 4xx and 5xx responses) over the trailing 24 hours, shown as a gauge. The “is the Shippo connection healthy right now?” signal. The alert trips above 2 percent, the threshold above which label creation, rate-shopping, and tracking ingestion start to feel the strain rather than absorbing the odd transient failure.

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What it tracks

The card divides failed Shippo API responses by total Shippo API calls over the rolling 24-hour window. Failures include authentication errors (a stale or revoked token, which is why this card moves in step with Days to Token Expiry), validation errors on label or rate requests (4xx), rate-limit responses (429), and Shippo-side or upstream-carrier outages (5xx). A low single-digit baseline is normal for any busy multi-carrier integration because individual carrier endpoints behind Shippo occasionally time out. A sustained climb above 2 percent points to one of three causes: an expiring or revoked API token, a specific underlying carrier credential failing, or a Shippo platform incident. Because the rate blends across all endpoints, pair it with Label Generation Success to confirm whether label creation specifically is the affected path.

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Reconciling against the source

Cross-check against the Shippo status page for platform-wide incidents and, for a credential-level failure, against the carrier account status in the Shippo dashboard (Settings, Carriers). A high error rate that coincides with a single carrier going inactive is a credential problem, not a Shippo outage; pair with Days to Token Expiry and Label Generation Success to localise it.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

API Error Rate is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Shippo 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.