Shipping Delays and Failed Deliveries: What to Do

One filter finds the stuck parcels; a fixed ladder tells your team what to do next.

Operations

Shipping delays are normal. Silence is what loses the customer. Nobody leaves because a parcel was two days late; they leave because they asked where it was and nobody knew.

Here is a fixed ladder for failed deliveries and stuck shipments, so your team never improvises.

Let Storix find the stuck ones

Storix already flags problem shipments and gives you one filter to see them. Open Shipping → Shipments and switch on Needs attention. Each flagged shipment carries its reason as a badge under the tracking number:

Stuck create — the shipment never reached the courier properly.
Needs customer contact — the shipment is On hold.
Failed attempt — an attempt failed and no new event arrived for 24 hours.
Late pickup — a Bosta parcel has a label, is linked to no pickup, and was created over 24 hours ago.

Two more places show it: a Needs shipping attention filter on Orders, and a Shipments needing attention card in Analytics → Shipping, counting anything unfinished with no update for over 3 days. Check twice a day.

The escalation ladder

Work in this order. Never skip a rung.

Force resync (free, 10 seconds). Open the shipment and click Force resync. It pulls the latest status from the courier and clears a Stuck create flag. Often the parcel already moved and the status was stale.
Read the timeline. Each event shows its type, time and any failure or on-hold reason — usually wrong address, phone off, or a buyer who asked to postpone.
Call the customer, not the courier. Most failures are address or phone problems. Confirm the street and a landmark, agree a day, and save it in Add manual note.
Escalate with the courier after 48 hours of no movement. Send the tracking number, order number, last event and what you want, and ask for a named owner and a callback time. Bosta works by ticket, so one clear message beats five.
Tell the buyer before they ask. One honest message with the new date beats ten "we are following up" replies. Send the tracking link from Customer tools.

What the buttons really do

Three actions look stronger than they are.

Record reschedule only writes your instructions on the timeline. It does not change the courier's plan, and only appears when the status is Attempt failed. Phone the courier anyway.
Cancel shipment works only at Pending or Label generated, and does not cancel with the courier: the parcel can still travel, and you can still be charged.
There is no in-app return-to-origin request yet. To recall a parcel, contact Bosta support with the tracking number and record the outcome as a note on the shipment.

Reship, recall, or refund

Decide with a rule, not a mood.

Reship when the buyer still wants the item and the address is fixed. Keep the old shipment for the record.
Recall after two failed attempts, or when the buyer stops answering. There is no in-app return-to-origin request yet; contact Bosta support with the tracking number, and for self-delivery arrange the pickup yourself — then record the outcome as a note on the shipment.
Refund when the delay broke the reason for the order: a birthday, a feast, a trip. Refund fast and apologise once.

A refused parcel costs the delivery leg plus the return leg, so a 60 EGP delivery can become 120 EGP of loss on an order you never collected.

Build the failure log

Use Export CSV on the Shipments page. It exports rows for your current status, provider, direction, kind and date filters — what a monthly review needs.

Keep one sheet with five columns: tracking number, courier, governorate, reason, outcome. Storix reports by courier and by product, not by governorate, so that column is yours. After a month, count: if one courier fails twice as often in Upper Egypt, split your parcels by area; if one product fails everywhere, the problem is packaging.

Storix flags stuck shipments under one Needs attention filter. Try it free.