Delivery Watch — Automatic delivery tracking

The job nobody wants to do

Open the carrier's website, paste a number, look. Start again with the next carrier. Come back tomorrow to the same parcels. Change the order status by hand once the parcel has arrived. Answer the worried customer by checking for them.

This module does all of it for you, every hour, without you thinking about it.

It finds the parcels on its own

As soon as a tracking number is entered in an order, the parcel joins its list. Nothing to declare, nothing to tick. It also works out which carrier to query from the name of your PrestaShop carrier, and you can override that by hand in the rare case it gets it wrong.

Three carrier families, your own credentials

• La Poste: Colissimo, Chronopost, Chronopost Shop2Shop, tracked letter, registered mail. One free key, created on La Poste's developer portal.
• Mondial Relay and InPost, with your brand code and private key.
• DHL Express, with a free key.

One of these keys is enough to start. Carriers you do not configure are simply ignored. Nothing goes through a middleman service: the module talks to the carrier directly, with your credentials, encrypted in your database.

The order moves to "Delivered" by itself

Once every parcel in an order has arrived, the order status changes and the customer gets their message. An order shipped in three parcels waits for the third. A cancelled, refunded or payment-error order is never reopened.

You choose which status to apply, and one setting switches the whole thing off if your process requires a human to close a sale.

Your customer follows the parcel step by step

Between dispatch and delivery, an order can sit on "Shipped" for a week. The customer has no information unless they open the order detail. The module can move it along at each step: handed to the carrier, out for delivery, available at the pickup point, delivery issue, return.

One button creates those statuses for you, with their colours, and fills in the settings. They send no email to begin with: you decide, step by step, whether your customer should be told.

An order never moves backwards. If a second parcel leaves three days after the first, the order does not drop back a step.

Tracking shows in the customer account

A "Track your parcel" block appears in the order detail on your shop: the status in plain words, the carrier, the number, a link to the carrier's own page and the last eight dated steps. While the carrier has reported nothing, the customer reads a short waiting sentence rather than an empty box.

This is what brings the "where is my parcel?" messages down.

It chases, and it warns you

• The parcel is waiting at the pickup point. After a delay you set, the customer gets a reminder. A parcel going back to the sender means a return at your expense and an unhappy customer.
• A parcel gets stuck, or the carrier reports a problem. You get an email with the list and the reason. You deal with it before the customer writes.

It cannot bring your shop down

This is what the module was built around, before any of its features.

• No carrier is ever called while a shop page is being displayed. Network calls happen only during the scheduled task.
• A lock prevents two synchronisations from overlapping.
• A time budget is checked before every call: if there is not enough time left, the work stops cleanly and resumes at the next run.
• A maximum number of parcels per run, adjustable.
• Each parcel is handled separately: an error on one never interrupts the others.
• 500 and 504 errors are ruled out by design, not by luck.

On security: your keys are encrypted in the database and never displayed again, outgoing calls are restricted to HTTPS with a verified certificate, and the scheduled task's address carries a secret token and can be limited to your own IP addresses.

The working screen

An Orders → Delivery tracking menu: your parcels with their status, counters at the top of the page, the average delivery time, and a CSV export. When a parcel gets stuck, the reason is written in the list, in red. A parcel's own page shows the carrier's history and the technical log for that shipment. On a narrow screen, two buttons stay on screen to scroll the table across to the hidden columns.

Colours everyone can tell apart

Every status carries a coloured badge. These colours do not rely on hue alone: a green and a red of the same lightness are the same colour to someone with red-green colour blindness, roughly one man in twelve. They are spread along lightness and along the blue-yellow axis, and checked pair by pair in normal vision, deuteranopia and protanopia. Contrast between a badge and its text never drops below 6.0, where the standard asks for 4.5.

It is a detail. It is also the difference between a list you read at a glance and a list you decipher.

What it does not do

• It does not create labels and does not buy postage. It reads what the carrier reports; it does not place orders with them.
• It knows only the three carrier families listed above. A parcel sent with another carrier is recorded, but never queried.
• It does not run on its own: a scheduled task has to call it. That is ten minutes of setup with your host, and it is not optional.

Installation

Upload, install, paste your keys, set up the scheduled task. Fifteen minutes. A complete manual comes with the module: every setting is explained, with a whole chapter on common symptoms and what to check for each one.