Feature Update: USPS Tracking Statuses

The vast majority of orders shipped from our fulfilment centre are done so domestically, meaning that we pass them to a UK based courier to handle delivery regardless of the destination country.

There is one exception to this: shipping to America via USPS.

The United States Postal Service is a domestic service available only in the US, and so it’s only possible to take advantage of the USPS delivery network by shipping parcels within US territories. Parcels shipped using our USPS service are first couriered to the US before being injected into the USPS network.

When shipping these orders we send a daily manifest to the courier containing all information for that day’s shipments. Previously, only once that manifest had been received and processed by the courier would we receive the tracking numbers corresponding to each parcel. This meant we couldn’t include USPS tracking numbers with the shipment notification email for each order, or update orders through integrated stores.

We’ve published some updates to fix this.

From today, when an order destined for the US is shipped it will be placed into a temporary new status, ‘Preparing Shipment’, until the tracking number is retrieved. Once we have the tracking number the order will update to ‘Shipped’ as normal, and the tracking details will be included within notification emails and updates to orders placed through an integration.

The new ‘Preparing Shipment’ order status

You’ll only ever see this status for an order shipping by USPS. It means your order has been shipped and is with our courier, but we’re awaiting the USPS tracking number before updating the status to ‘Shipped’.

Once an order has been updated to the ‘Preparing Shipment’ status you will not be able to update the shipping details for the order since at this point it has been handed off to our courier.

If you have any questions about this update you can jump on live chat (the chat icon to the right) or email info@inkthreadable.co.uk.

Ashley Grimshaw

Ashley Grimshaw

Content Manager

Posted in Service Updates on