Last Mile Carrier

Overview

This article explains the importance of last-mile carriers and how Rush provides different options for these carriers. A last mile carrier is the delivery service that delivers the order to the buyer’s doorstep. Last mile carriers are local carriers that people are usually familiar with, making it easier for customers to contact them and schedule delivery times, when they miss the delivery. In short, the last-mile carrier is the final one that delivers the order to the customer.

Benefits of knowing the last-mile carrier

  • Increased customer satisfaction: Customers see carriers they recognize rather than the ones they never heard of. In most of the cases, the stores are familiar with these carriers and have already worked with them in the past. This brings an added sense of security.
  • Less time spent in support: You can proactively give contacts to the last-mile carrier, so if a delivery fails, the end customer can handle the scheduling of redelivery by themselves, rather than having to follow up from the stores' customer support.
  • Fewer chargebacks: At times if the end customer sees the orders being handed over to an unknown carrier, they tend to recheck the order and request chargebacks, as sometimes they think it is a scam.

Explanation

Once your fulfilment service provider fulfils an order, they can set the global carrier tracking number, e.g. from companies like YunExpress, 4PX, China Post, or others. However, those carriers will not deliver the order to your customer's address, the last-mile carrier will do that. For example, on their page, YunExpress tracking number YT2104121266032515 will show you that the last mile carrier is USPS, based on the tracking number.

Based on the information by YunExpress, the store owners can see the information inside the shipment within the Rush system as such:



Shipment events processing in Rush

Rush shows all shipment statuses at all points including the one when the first last-mile carrier event enters in the In transit state. The purpose of displaying the shipment events such as pickup ready, out for delivery, delivered, etc is to display the order in moving state to the end customer.

Let’s understand this better with the help of two different cases.

Case 1: International  carrier shows the shipment status In transit, while the last-mile carrier is in pending status.

Suppose, YunExpress has been sharing checkpoints of carrier movement since 3rd March.

However, USPS will not show any new information for a couple of days, till it receives the order and starts its transit.

For this case, customers will see events from YunExpress, as shown below:

Case 2: The international carrier shows shipment status In transit and the last-mile carrier shows In transit status as well.

Global carrier status shows In transit in the example below:


The last-mile carrier also shows the In transit status:


In this case, Rush will take events from the last-mile carrier only, as it provides better updated customer information.

Known issues

There are some issues that you might face regarding the last-mile carrier information. 

  • For example, in the image below, we can see the last-mile carrier is Canada Post but there is still no tracking number assigned to it. It is because it takes a few days for last-mile carriers to populate this information. In some cases, this information is not set at all.
  • Another issue is that even after the global carrier has delivered the shipment to the last-mile carrier with the tracking number, it may still not show on the carrier’s website. For example, in the image below, it can be seen that YunExpress has returned the order to the carrier Royal Mail with the tracking number:

    However, it might still not show on Royal Mail’s page because it has not been processed yet: 

Conclusion

In conclusion, Rush is able to show the last mile carrier information, based on the international carrier that is shared with Rush.

Contact us

For more information, feel free to reach out to us and let us assist you.