Shipments — Tracking

Shipment tracking serves three main purposes:

Show the current delivery progress inside Parcel Pilot.
Automatically progress shipment/order statuses based on carrier scans.
Optionally push tracking/fulfilment confirmation back to the ecommerce platform.

Tracking basics

A shipment typically has:

Carrier and service
Tracking number
A derived tracking URL (carrier page link)
A normalised status (in transit/out for delivery/delivered/etc.)

Tracking polling

Tracking polling runs periodically for shipments that are not final.

Depending on how the shipment was created/booked, Parcel Pilot can poll:

UPS
Royal Mail
DPD
DHL Express
Transglobal Express

Notes:

Manual/external shipments may have tracking stored but cannot always be polled (depends on carrier/integration configuration).

Does tracking get sent back to eCommerce?

It can, if enabled.

When a shipment is created or its tracking is updated, Parcel Pilot can push shipment confirmation (including tracking) back to the appropriate ecommerce integration.

Important:

This respects a per-integration toggle (for example, “push shipping confirmations”). If the toggle is off, no upstream update is sent.
For merged orders, a single shipment can be pushed back to multiple upstream orders in the merge group.

Troubleshooting

If tracking status isn’t updating, check the shipment has a tracking number and a supported carrier.
If tracking isn’t pushed back upstream, check the Client Integration settings for shipment-confirmation pushing.
If a carrier API fails, shipments store tracking debug/audit info in shipment metadata for investigation.