Skip to main content
Metrics type: Supporting Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier

​
At a glance

Count of Shippo shipments in the trailing 7 days whose tracking reached a terminal failure state: undeliverable, returned to sender, refused, or otherwise closed without a delivered scan. These are the parcels that did not arrive and will not without intervention, the terminal tail of Exception Rate.

​
What it tracks

Where Exception Rate is the leading indicator, Failed Deliveries is the bill that lands when an exception does not recover. This card counts the parcels whose Shippo tracking ended in a terminal failure: marked undeliverable, returned to sender, refused at the door, or closed as lost, with no delivered scan. Each one is a refund or a re-ship, a customer-service ticket, and often a double freight charge (outbound plus return leg). For most US DTC stores a healthy reading sits below 1 percent of volume; the 2 percent alert is the point where the cost and the WISMO ticket load become material. The most common drivers are bad or incomplete addresses that never got corrected, repeated recipient-not-home attempts that exhaust the carrier’s retry policy, and customs rejections on international lanes. Pair with Returned to Sender to see how many failures came back versus were lost, and First-Attempt Delivery Rate to catch the attempt failures before they turn terminal.

​
Reconciling against the source

Cross-check against the Shippo dashboard under Tracking, filtered to returned and failed statuses for the same 7 days, and against the underlying carrier’s own portal scans (USPS Informed Visibility, UPS Quantum View, FedEx tracking). Carrier scan timestamps are in carrier-local time and Shippo polls every 1 to 4 hours, so a failure logged late in the day can appear in the card a few hours after the carrier recorded it.

​
Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Failed Deliveries 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.