When a parcel goes wrong, Panelque says so

The worst way to find out a parcel came back is a knock on the workshop door.

The second worst is an email from a customer three weeks later asking where their order went, and discovering the box has been sitting in a locker, then a depot, then a return van, while nobody was watching.

We had the tracking data the whole time. InPost had been telling us exactly what happened, in order, with timestamps. The information was in the app. It just wasn’t in front of anyone – you had to open the shipment and read its history, and nobody opens a shipment they have no reason to suspect.

Most statuses are noise

A parcel generates a lot of events on its way to someone’s door. Created. Collected by courier. In transit. Sorted at the logistics centre. Dispatched. Arrived at destination. Ready to collect. Reminder to collect.

All of that is fine. All of that is the system working. If we told you about each one, you’d mute us inside a day – and then miss the one that mattered.

So the question wasn’t “how do we show more tracking information”. It was: which of these events means someone has to do something?

Three that do

The parcel is coming back. The customer never collected it, or InPost decided for its own reasons to send it home. You hear about it twice, deliberately: once when the return starts, and once when the box is physically back with you.

The first message is the useful one. The parcel is still on the road, and there’s a window to call the customer, arrange a redelivery, or at least tell them before they wonder. The second message is the practical one – the box is on your shelf, so restock it or refund it and close the order.

The parcel is gone. Missing, damaged, destroyed. Nothing is coming back and the customer got nothing. That order needs a refund or a replacement today, not whenever someone notices the shipment stopped moving.

The shipment was cancelled. Before delivery, by you or by the customer. Rare, but it silently strands an order that looks fulfilled in Shopify.

And several that don’t

This is the part we spent the most time on.

InPost also reports failed delivery attempts. Nobody home. No access to the building. Locker full. Parcel expired at the pickup point. Recipient refused it.

Every one of those sounds like an emergency and mostly isn’t. Couriers retry. Lockers free up. A parcel marked “expired” at one pickup point often gets moved to another and collected two days later. If we raised an alarm on all of them, most alarms would be false – and a notification you learn to ignore is worse than no notification at all.

So Panelque stays quiet through the wobble and speaks when InPost commits: when the parcel is genuinely turning around, genuinely lost, or genuinely cancelled.

Where it shows up

As a note on the order – the same notes your team already writes to each other.

That means it lands in three places at once without you configuring anything: the notes card on the home page, the order itself, and the unresolved notes panel on the Panelque TV screen in the workshop. Whoever looks up first sees it.

The note says which parcel, what happened, and what to do about it. When you’ve dealt with it, you resolve it and it goes quiet – like any other note.

The boring parts we got right

• Never twice. Panelque keeps checking a parcel until its story ends, but a status it has already told you about never produces a second note.
• Resolved stays resolved. Deal with a return, resolve the note, and the next check doesn’t reopen it.
• Both halves of a return. “On its way back” and “back with you” are different problems with different answers, so they’re different notes.
• Quiet by default. No settings to configure, no channel to connect. If nothing goes wrong, you never hear from this feature at all.

Nothing to configure, nothing to check. If a parcel turns around, you’ll know while it’s still on the road.