You’ll sometimes notice that orders have moved from a Shipped to an Assumed Delivered status in the Merchant Portal. In this article, we’ll explain why this status exists, the conditions in which an order will move to this status, and how you can manage orders once they are in this status.
When orders are shipped, Blackcart uses the provided tracking number from Shopify and uses EasyPost to track the carrier shipping status of this order. Sometimes, tracking fails and or the tracking number is simply not supported by EasyPost and thus, orders become stuck, and customers are unable to make their keep or send back decisions.
Why do we have an Assumed Delivered order status?
For background, Blackcart uses EasyPost to track the shipping status of the order, where we receive an estimated delivery date along with a real time order delivery notification with every tracking ID added to the order in Shopify. When the tracking ID is added to the order in Shopify, we move the product and order status in our system to a Shipped status. We then listen for the tracking status to update with both the estimated delivery date and confirmation that the package has been delivered. We do not start the customer’s trial period until all items in the customer’s order have been delivered.
For a small % of orders, the shipping carrier’s tracking information is broken, and Blackcart is unable to effectively track the delivery status of the order. This can be problematic for your customers because they will not be able to initiate a “keep” or “send back” decision on their order until the order status has successfully moved to the Trial in Progress status (upon delivery) unless someone from your team intervenes to manually start the trial period.
To help reduce the cases of this happening, Blackcart has developed a back-up system where we automatically move orders into an “Assumed Delivered” status based on a certain set of criteria.
Conditions where an order is moved to the Assumed Delivered status:
Scenario 1: 3 full days have passed since the last reported Estimated Delivery date recorded by EasyPost.
Example: for the order below, EasyPost is showing an estimated delivery date of June 28th. If by July 2nd, the estimated delivery date is still set as June 28th, Blackcart will move the order status to Assumed Delivered. We run this sweeper in our system twice daily, so in the instance that the estimated delivery date updates before the 3 full days have passed, the date at which we move the order to Assumed Delivered will be recalculated (based on the new estimated delivery date).
Scenario 2: EasyPost can't read the tracker at all.
Example 1: The carrier tracker on the Customer Portal order page is not hyperlinked and therefore EasyPost is not able to track the delivery status. This item will be marked delivered in 10 days after the posted ship date.
Example 2: The carrier tracker is linked on the Customer Portal order page, but when clicking into it, you can see that EasyPost was unable to track the estimated delivery date. This item will be marked delivered in 10 days after the posted ship date.
How to manage orders in the Assumed Delivered status
If an order is marked as assumed-delivered, but the customer contacts you to let you know that they have not yet received their order, you can modify the order status from the Merchant Portal.
From the order details page, use the "Select Action" dropdown and select “Revert Assumed Delivery”. Click the Play button to run the action.
In the Revert Assumed Delivery modal, choose the option which fits the actual status of the order.
- Confirm As Delivered - if the order has been delivered. This moves the order to the Delivered Status.
- Revert to Shipped - if the order has not been delivered yet. Moves the order back to the Shipped Status. Note that by reverting any order that was once in the Assumed Delivered status back to the Shipped status, the order will then be excluded from the system that checks for stuck orders moving forward. If the tracker was broken (which is likely the case), there is a chance that this order will not be moved to Delivered automatically when it is actually delivered, so it may require manual intervention from your team to start the Trial Period once the customer confirms that they have in fact received their order. In the event that the customer confirms that they have still not received their package, instead of moving the order back to Shipped, we suggest moving the order to Delivered, and then extending the trial period to a reasonable amount of time based on the estimated delivery date.
- Leave as is - does not modify the status of the order at all. This is used when there are multiple trackers associated with the order and you do not want to modify a specific tracker.
Click “Go” to confirm the modification of the order. If there are multiple trackers in an order, all orders must be moved out of “assumed-delivered” to change the status of the order.