At a glance
Share of ShippyPro shipments that recorded any non-progress tracking event during transit, pooled across every carrier ShippyPro orchestrated. Address invalid, attempted-no-answer, held at depot, customs hold, damaged, lost. The early-warning signal that predicts a falling OTD Rate at 24 to 72 hours, with the wrinkle that each of the 100+ supported carriers has its own exception taxonomy and ShippyPro normalises them.
| What it counts | COUNT(shipments WHERE EXISTS(tracking_event WITH event_type IN exception_set)) / COUNT(shipments) over the trailing 30 days. Each shipment scores once even if it threw multiple exceptions. |
| Delivery success criterion | Not directly applicable. Exceptions surface during transit, not at terminal status. |
| On-time threshold | Not applicable. The OTD card answers “did it arrive on time”; this card answers “did anything go wrong on the way”. |
| Returns / RTO | Outbound only by default. Easy Return shipments and RTS events appear separately (Returned to Sender). |
| Service level scope | All carriers and services pooled. Per-carrier breakdown lives in OTD by Route and Rate-Shop Winner Mix. |
| Exception-event categories (normalised) | (1) Address (invalid postcode, missing civic number for IT, missing CAP) ~30 percent. (2) Recipient (attempted-no-answer, refused, redirect to PUDO) ~26 percent. (3) Depot/network (held at depot, missed cutoff, ferragosto hold) ~24 percent. (4) Customs / border (cross-border to UK/CH/non-EU) ~12 percent. (5) Damage / lost ~8 percent. The mix is more border-heavy than ShipTheory because of cross-border share. |
| Currency | Not applicable, this is a rate. |
| Time window | 30D vsP (rolling 30 days vs prior 30 days). |
| Alert trigger | >3% critical, >1% warn, driven by sentiment_key: exception_rate. EU/IT benchmark on a balanced mix is 1.2 to 2.0 percent; cross-border-heavy accounts run 1.8 to 2.5 percent structurally because of customs events. Above 3 percent typically signals a sub-carrier or border event. |
| Roles | owner, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your ShippyPro data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
The same Italian DTC fashion brand (BRT, DHL Express, Poste Italiane, GLS). Reading taken at 09:00 CET on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 30 days (10 Feb 26 to 11 Mar 26).| Exception category | Shipments affected | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| Address (CAP missing, civic number missing, address-line invalid) | 138 | 0.86% |
| Recipient (attempted-no-answer, refused, PUDO redirect requested) | 122 | 0.76% |
| Depot / network (held at BRT/Poste depot, missed cutoff, weather hold) | 110 | 0.69% |
| Customs / border (UK/CH cross-border declaration issues) | 56 | 0.35% |
| Damage / lost | 38 | 0.24% |
| All exceptions (this card) | 464 | 2.90% |
>3% is just under the trip line. Five things to notice:
- Per-carrier exception rates differ structurally. The 464 exceptions break down approximately: BRT ~150, Poste Italiane ~180, DHL Express ~50, GLS ~84. Poste Italiane’s exception rate per parcel is the highest of the four; this is structural for a Posta 4 service, not a degradation. Pair with OTD by Route to see where exceptions translate to OTD damage.
- Customs exceptions cluster on UK/CH lanes post-Brexit. The 56 customs exceptions are almost entirely UK-IT and CH-IT cross-border, where commercial-invoice data is incomplete or HS codes are missing. Fix at the label-creation layer: ensure the Shopify or BigCommerce export passes correct
harmonized_codeandcommercial_invoice_valueto ShippyPro. - Address exceptions cluster on Italian addresses with missing CAP or civic number. Italian addresses require CAP (postal code) and civic number; many checkout flows allow these to be skipped. Install Italian-aware address validation (EgonReg, Loqate IT) at checkout. Typical lift: 50 to 70 percent reduction within 30 days.
- The 38 damage / lost cases are claim-eligible. Each is an Open Claim opportunity; claim processes vary materially per carrier (DHL Express auto-resolves at ~5 working days; Poste Italiane statutory window is 30+ days). Track ageing on Open Claims.
- Italian holidays distort the depot-hold category. The 10 to 25 Aug ferragosto window typically lifts depot-hold exceptions by 3 to 5x because Italian carrier networks run skeleton crews. Pre-baseline customer-facing copy on those windows.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Exception rate is the leading indicator. Pair with these to predict OTD damage and to find the operational lever:| Card | Why pair it with Exception Rate | What the combination tells you |
|---|---|---|
| On-Time Delivery Rate | The downstream outcome. | Exception rate leads OTD by 24 to 72 hours. A 1-point exception rise predicts a 1.5 to 3 point OTD dip 2 to 3 days later. |
| OTD by Route | The per-carrier and per-lane view. | Identifies which carrier is generating the exception cluster; Poste Italiane and cross-border lanes show up here even when the headline OTD looks fine. |
| Late Shipments | The volumetric workload that follows. | Use the exception count to forecast next week’s CS-ticket load. |
| Failed Deliveries | The subset of exceptions that ended in non-delivery. | High exception rate + low failed = self-resolving; high failed = exceptions escalating. |
| Open Claims | Damage / lost exceptions feed claims. | Damage / lost exception count + 7 to 14 days lag = future open-claim count. |
| Rate-Shop Winner Mix | Exception rate moves with carrier mix. | Poste Italiane share rising = exception rate rising even if no carrier degraded. |
| Label Generation Success | Adjacent operational signal. | Failed labels never enter the exception denominator; the card may under-read while label-gen is broken. |
Cross-connector: shopify.unfulfilled_orders | Upstream label-data origin. | Shopify checkout addresses missing CAP or civic number produce IT address exceptions. Install Italian-aware validation. |
Cross-connector: bigcommerce.unfulfilled_orders | Same upstream relationship for BC. | Same fix path. |
Cross-connector: shopify.refund_rate | Downstream financial impact. | Sustained exception spikes typically precede refund-rate climbs at 7 to 14 days. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in ShippyPro’s own dashboard: ShippyPro Dashboard → Tracking → Exceptions (Italian: Eccezioni). The page lists shipments with at least one non-progress event over the chosen window with category, carrier, event timestamp, and resolution status. Closest like-for-like view: Last 30 Days, All Carriers, All Categories. ShippyPro also offers per-country lane filtering useful for diagnosing cross-border patterns. Why our number may legitimately differ from ShippyPro’s portal:| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Carrier event taxonomy normalisation | Tiny | The 100+ supported carriers have varying event codes; ShippyPro normalises to a unified taxonomy. ~95 percent map cleanly; the residual 5 percent (legacy IT regional carriers, Spanish customs codes) can shift the count by 0.1 to 0.3 points. |
| Auto-resolved exceptions | Either | Brief depot transit-pauses and short-lived holds may not appear in the portal’s default view; the card includes them. Toggle Include transient in the portal to match. |
| Sync timing on most recent 1 to 6h | Ours lower briefly | Tracking webhooks land in real time but the card aggregates on a 4-hour cycle; the portal recomputes overnight. |
| Time zone | Boundary days | ShippyPro uses workspace timezone (CET/CEST for IT/EU accounts) for daily aggregation; we use UTC for cross-connector arithmetic. |
| Italian holiday smoothing | Either | The portal historically allowed an “exclude ferragosto” toggle for August. The card does NOT smooth; year-on-year comparisons across August windows should annotate. |
| Returns leg | Either | Easy Return events excluded by default here; the portal’s unfiltered view includes them. |
shippy_pro.otd_rate(t) ≈ baseline_otd - 1.5 × Δ(shippy_pro.exception_rate(t-2d))
A 1-point exception-rate rise typically translates to roughly 1.5 points of OTD drop two days later. Forecast-grade, not contractual.
Cross-connector reconciliation. Direct-carrier connectors vs ShippyPro:
If you also have direct-carrier connectors connected (direct DHL Express, direct Poste Italiane, direct GLS), do not sum exception rates. Each direct connector reads from the carrier’s API with the carrier’s native event taxonomy:
- ShippyPro’s view uses normalised taxonomy across all carriers.
- Direct DHL uses DHL’s native event codes which include events ShippyPro buckets differently.
- Differences of 0.2 to 0.5 points are normal; larger gaps suggest the two are filtering shipments or events differently.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Why is my ShippyPro exception rate spiking? Three usual causes, in order of likelihood:- Address-quality regression at checkout, especially on Italian addresses. A storefront change (new theme, missing CAP validator) typically produces a step-change in IT address exceptions within 7 to 14 days.
- Carrier capacity stress (ferragosto, Christmas, Pasqua). Italian and EU peak windows lift depot-hold exceptions materially. Ferragosto is the worst.
- Cross-border customs friction. Post-Brexit UK-IT lanes, CH-IT lanes, and any non-EU shipment that requires harmonised codes generate customs exceptions when the label data is incomplete. Recently-added cross-border lanes spike this category.
- Install Italian-aware address validation at checkout. EgonReg, Loqate IT, Subito-Address. Validates CAP, civic number, and address-line completeness against the official Italian post-office database. Typical lift: 50 to 70 percent reduction in IT address exceptions within 30 days.
- Fix the harmonised-code and commercial-invoice flow for cross-border. Most cross-border customs exceptions come from missing or incorrect HS codes; ensure your Shopify or BC export passes correct
harmonized_codeandcommercial_invoice_valueto ShippyPro. Eliminates most customs exceptions on UK / CH / non-EU lanes. - Shift Friday despatch to before lunch. Italian carriers (BRT, Poste) end Friday collection earlier than UK or AU peers; pull cutoffs to 12:00 to claim the Friday morning collection.
- Move medium-value parcels off Poste Italiane. A few cents per parcel for material exception-rate improvement on the affected slice.
- Pre-empt ferragosto with widened ETAs. Customers seeing accurate “delivered by 22 Aug” expectations on a 10 Aug order will not generate as many “where is my order” tickets as those expecting the original 16 Aug. Reduces perceived exception-rate cost even when operational number is unchanged.