Tracking beyond InPost

Package tracking was the first thing we ever built into Panelque, back when InPost was carrying almost everything we shipped. The Active shipments list on the dashboard has been running since, and it’s still the page we open most often.

It had one gap. Not every parcel goes with InPost - some customers pick Poczta Polska at checkout, and those shipments sat in the list as a tracking number and nothing else. Status: pending, forever. To find out where the parcel was, you copied the number into the emonitoring page like it was 2010.

Now Panelque follows those too.

Poczta Polska in the same list

Poczta Polska parcels update themselves alongside everything else: the same Active shipments table, the same status badge, the same event history when you click a shipment, the same “updated 4 minutes ago”. Panelque asks the same public tracking service the official emonitoring page uses, so you see exactly what the carrier’s own site shows - including which sorting facility the parcel passed through, because “In transit” means something rather different when the terminal name is next to it.

Event times arrive in Warsaw local time and get stored properly, so a parcel scanned at 17:41 doesn’t show up an hour off in your history.

Recognizing the carrier

Shopify hands us the carrier as free text. “InPost”, “DHL Express”, “Poczta Polska Kurier48”, and — often enough — nothing useful at all, because whoever created the fulfillment picked “Other”.

So Panelque reads the tracking number instead. Some formats are unmistakable:

• RR123456789PL - two letters, nine digits, PL. That’s Poczta Polska.
• A twenty-digit number starting 003404 - DHL Paket.
• 1Z followed by sixteen characters - UPS.

When the carrier field is vague and the number isn’t, the number wins. And every carrier Panelque recognizes - InPost, Poczta Polska, DHL, DPD, GLS, UPS, FedEx - gets a working tracking link on the shipment, even the ones we don’t poll ourselves. One click instead of copy, switch tab, paste.

Polite by design

Carriers don’t owe us a tracking API, so Panelque behaves like a guest:

• One lane. All carrier polling runs in a single queue with pauses between parcels. No bursts.
• It stops when the parcel does. Once a shipment is delivered or returned to sender, polling ends for good. Nothing keeps asking about a package that arrived last month.
• Ignore what will never resolve. A parcel stuck in limbo can be ignored from the list, and Panelque stops checking it.

Why it matters more than it sounds

A delivery date isn’t only an operations number. It’s the start of the clock on the metric we care about most - how long it takes a happy customer to come back and order again. Every parcel we couldn’t track was a hole in that data, and the holes were all in one carrier.

The wall in the workshop now shows every shipment on the road, whoever is carrying it. Which carrier we add next mostly depends on what our customers pick at checkout.