> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vortexiq.ai/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Label-Generation Success Rate, ShippyPro > ShippyPro's core SLA - did label generation succeed across the carrier mix? How to read it, why it matters, and how to act on it. **Metrics type:** [Key Metrics](/nerve-centre/overview#metrics-types-explained) • **Category:** [Shipping & Courier](/nerve-centre/connectors#connectors-by-type) > ShippyPro's core SLA - did label generation succeed across the carrier mix? ## 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. | | | | --------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **What it counts** | `COUNT(label_create_calls WHERE status = 'success') / COUNT(label_create_calls)` over the trailing 24 hours. Each call is one label attempt; retries count as separate calls. | | **API endpoint** | `POST /shipments/labels` (ShippyPro's label-creation endpoint). The card reads HTTP response code and parsed `success` flag from each attempt. | | **Failure modes counted** | (1) Carrier downtime, the underlying carrier API rejected the rate-shop call. (2) ShippyPro internal errors, 5xx from ShippyPro itself. (3) Validation errors, invalid address, invalid weight, missing customs declaration on cross-border. (4) Auth errors, 401 from expired token (links to [Days to Token Expiry](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shippy-pro/days-to-token-expiry)). | | **Carrier-mix sensitivity** | Failures are not uniformly distributed. Italian and EU regional carriers (Poste Italiane, BRT) have higher native API instability than majors (DHL Express, GLS, UPS). A 95% reading on a Poste-heavy account often resolves to 99% if Poste is excluded. | | **Returns / RTO** | Includes Easy Return label generation; treats them identically to outbound. | | **Service level scope** | All services and carriers pooled. Per-carrier breakdown lives in the carrier sub-tile of the same card. | | **Currency** | Not applicable. | | **Time window** | `24H` (rolling 24-hour window) | | **Alert trigger** | `<98%`. Tripped when success rate drops below 98 percent. The 2 percent cushion is industry-standard for label-print SLA; below that, despatch operations notice queue stall. | | **Sentiment key** | `label_generation_success` | | **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 Italian DTC fashion brand. Reading taken at 09:00 CET on 12 Mar 26 for the trailing 24 hours. | Carrier | Label calls (24h) | Successful | Failures | Success rate | Most common failure | | ---------------------------- | ----------------- | ---------- | -------- | ------------ | ---------------------- | | BRT | 920 | 916 | 4 | 99.6% | Address validation | | DHL Express | 410 | 410 | 0 | 100.0% | (none) | | GLS | 380 | 376 | 4 | 98.9% | Carrier 5xx | | Poste Italiane | 240 | 218 | 22 | 90.8% | Carrier 503 (downtime) | | UPS | 60 | 60 | 0 | 100.0% | (none) | | **All carriers (this card)** | **2,010** | **1,980** | **30** | **98.5%** | | 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. ## Sibling cards merchants should reference together Label-generation success is the gate; many other cards depend on it being green. Pair with these: | Card | Why pair it with Label Generation Success | What the combination tells you | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | [Days to Token Expiry](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shippy-pro/days-to-token-expiry) | Token expiry produces 100 percent failure with 401 errors. | Both cards red simultaneously = expired token, rotate immediately. | | [API Error Rate](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shippy-pro/api-error-rate) | Same underlying signal, different angle. | Error rate climbing while label success is dropping = carrier-side or ShippyPro-side issue. | | [Shipments](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shippy-pro/shipments) | Volume processed; reflects label-success in absolute terms. | Volume drop without label-success drop = upstream order-flow drop (not connector). Volume drop with label-success drop = connector issue. | | [OTD by Route](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shippy-pro/otd-by-route) | Per-carrier breakdown context. | If a carrier's label success is degrading, watch its OTD; carrier API instability often correlates with carrier physical-network issues. | | Cross-connector: [`shopify.unfulfilled_orders`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/unfulfilled-orders) | Downstream impact. Failed labels = unfulfilled orders piling up in Shopify. | Climbing Shopify unfulfilled is the customer-visible symptom of label-generation drop. | | Cross-connector: warehouse-management system queue depth | Direct operational view of orders waiting for label. | Queue stalling without label-success drop = warehouse-side problem. Queue stalling with label-success drop = ShippyPro-side problem. | ## Reconciling against the vendor's own dashboard **Where to look in ShippyPro's own dashboard:** [ShippyPro Dashboard](https://www.shippypro.com/app) → **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:** | Reason | Direction | Why | | ------------------------------ | --------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | **Retry counting** | Ours sometimes lower | The card counts each retry as a separate attempt; some portal views collapse retries into a single "shipment" outcome. If a label took 3 attempts to succeed, the card scores 2 failures and 1 success (66.7% on that shipment); the portal may show 100% (the shipment ultimately got a label). | | **Internal-error attribution** | Either | ShippyPro classifies some 5xx errors as carrier-side, others as ShippyPro-side; the card pools them. Different filter states in the portal may show different denominators. | | **Validation pre-check** | Ours sometimes higher | If your client-side validation rejects a label before submitting (e.g. weight = 0), the card never sees it; ShippyPro's portal may show it as a "rejected" attempt. | | **Timezone** | Boundary hour off | Card defaults to UTC; portal defaults to workspace timezone. The 24h boundary shifts. | **Cross-connector reconciliation:** | Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence | | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | [`shopify.unfulfilled_orders`](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shopify/unfulfilled-orders) | Downstream effect; label-failure drops directly raise unfulfilled count. | Manual fulfilment, B2B flows, Shopify-app retry behaviours that mask the label failure. | | Direct carrier status pages (DHL service status, BRT alerts) | Upstream truth on carrier-side downtime. | Carriers post outage notices on their status pages; correlate to the timestamped failures in the card's audit log. | ***
Documentation cross-reference (for agencies running multi-platform stacks) Label-generation success is the universal Key Metrics card across shipping connectors. The semantics are essentially identical; the carrier mix and failure-mode distribution differ. * [Sendle Label Generation Success](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/sendle/label-generation-success) (single-carrier, simpler failure-mode distribution) * [ShipTheory Label Generation Success](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/ship-theory/label-generation-success-rate) (UK aggregator, sub-carrier failure attribution)
## 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](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shippy-pro/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](/nerve-centre/kpi-cards/shippy-pro/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. *** ### 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](https://app.vortexiq.ai/login) or [book a demo](https://www.vortexiq.ai/contact-us) to see this metric running on your own data.