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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier
ShippyPro’s core SLA - did label generation succeed across the carrier mix?

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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 ShippyPro: when this drops below 98%, orders cannot be despatched, regardless of how healthy the carriers, the warehouse, or the rate-shop ruleset are. The fault is between Vortex IQ and ShippyPro, or between ShippyPro and the underlying carriers.

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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.

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Worked example

The Italian DTC fashion brand. Reading taken at 09:00 CET on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 24 hours. The card reads 98.5%; the alert at <98% is not firing at the aggregate but Poste Italiane alone is materially below. Five things to notice:
  1. Poste Italiane’s 90.8% drags the aggregate down by 1.4 points. If Poste volume rises (rate-shop swings to it for cheap parcels), the aggregate drops below 98% even with no other change. The aggregate masks the per-carrier instability; per-carrier sub-tiles are mandatory reading.
  2. 22 Poste failures over 24 hours = 22 orders that could not despatch. They sit in the warehouse queue waiting for retry. The operational fix during a Poste downtime is to override rate-shop temporarily to BRT for those parcels (at 30 to 50 percent higher per-label cost) and despatch. The card is the trigger for the override decision.
  3. DHL Express and UPS at 100% are the carrier-network benchmark. If they ever drop below 99%, the issue is almost certainly ShippyPro-side or your-account-side, not carrier-side. Use them as the control.
  4. The 4 BRT and 4 GLS failures are noise-floor. Under 1 percent failure on healthy carriers is normal; address-validation rejections (postcode does not match city, missing house number) account for most. They retry successfully on next attempt; the 24-hour window absorbs them.
  5. Aggregate 98.5% is the intervention threshold. At 98% exact, queue stall is visible to despatch staff (~10 to 30 orders waiting at any moment); at 95%, full operations escalation; at 90%, P1 incident regardless of which carrier is failing. The card’s alert at 98% is calibrated for the first-detection signal, not the visible-pain threshold.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in ShippyPro’s own dashboard: ShippyPro Dashboard → API Health → Label Creation Stats (not always exposed by default; visible to enterprise tier or by support request). The closest like-for-like is Last 24h, All Carriers, All Services. ShippyPro also exposes a per-call audit log at Logs → API Calls → Filter type:label_create that shows the actual error response per failure. Why our number may legitimately differ from ShippyPro’s portal: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why is Poste Italiane structurally less reliable than DHL Express? Capacity model. Poste Italiane runs on Italian-public-postal infrastructure with batch-mode label issuance windows; their API takes occasional 503 spells during peak processing. DHL Express runs a private-network real-time API with multi-region failover. The cost-vs-reliability trade is real and intentional in the rate-shop ruleset. The card shows 95% but our orders are still going out. Why? Retry behaviour. ShippyPro’s connector retries failed labels up to 3 times with 30-second backoff. A 95% first-attempt success rate often resolves to 99%+ post-retries on shipment level. Operations only sees the queue stall when retries also fail (5%-of-5%, 0.25% of shipments). The card flags the upstream signal before that translates to user-visible pain. My account is mostly DHL and we still see 97%. Why? Address-validation rejections. DHL’s API is strict about postal-code-vs-city alignment, especially for cross-border. If your customer-data quality is uneven (typos, missing house numbers, IT/SM/VA address ambiguity), DHL rejects the label. The fix is upstream address validation, not carrier change. Should I exclude failed validation attempts from the metric? Trade-off. Including them gives you the full-stack picture (everything that broke between order and label). Excluding them isolates the connector-and-carrier picture. Default is included; for diagnosis, the audit log shows the failure-mode breakdown. Why 24h window and not 1h? Smoothing. Carrier APIs have transient 5xx spells (especially Poste Italiane mid-day, BRT during overnight maintenance windows). A 1h window would alert constantly on noise; 24h gives enough samples to distinguish persistent issues from blips. For real-time incident-response, watch the audit log directly. My label success rate dropped sharply. What is the diagnosis flow? Five steps. (1) Check Days to Token Expiry, expired token = 100 percent failure. (2) Check carrier-mix sub-tile, is one carrier failing or all? (3) Check the failing carrier’s status page (DHL, GLS, BRT all publish). (4) Check the audit log for failure-message distribution, validation vs 5xx vs auth. (5) If unclear, contact ShippyPro support with the timestamped failure samples; they can correlate against their internal queue. What is “ShippyPro’s core SLA”? The label-creation API is the highest-criticality endpoint ShippyPro operates. Their internal SLA targets 99.9% availability for the label endpoint excluding carrier-side failures. Most enterprise contracts include credits if they breach. The card’s 98% threshold is the merchant-facing operational threshold, not the SLA contract threshold. Cross-border / customs labels, do they have a different failure profile? Yes. Labels for non-EU destinations (UK post-Brexit, CH, NO) require customs declaration data that the merchant must provide; missing fields produce validation failures. These typically show as 60-80 percent success on the affected lane until the merchant’s order data pipeline includes the customs fields. Read this card alongside Shipments by Destination to spot lane-specific issues. Can I use this card to negotiate carrier contracts? Yes, indirectly. Pair it with carrier-specific reliability extracts from the audit log; carriers running materially below 99% on healthy windows lose volume in the rate-shop and accept that as the outcome. If you want to bring it up in QBR, present 90-day rolling reliability per carrier from the trend view, not the snapshot.

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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 ShippyPro 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.