Shipping Performance Reporting

When shipping looks fine internally, but customers are still waiting

Shipping is where fulfillment becomes real to customers. They do not see your pick path, your pack stations, or your staffing plan. They see a delivery estimate, then they watch tracking. If tracking does not move, shipping performance feels bad, even if the warehouse thinks it finished on time. That mismatch is why shipping performance reporting matters. It translates warehouse events into customer reality, and it surfaces problems early enough to fix them.

Many brands discover they need better reporting after the same set of surprises repeats. A carrier pickup is missed. A same-day cutoff quietly becomes next-day. A retailer issues a compliance penalty that feels like a tax on your patience. In each case, the shipping performance report either told the truth too late or did not tell the truth at all.

What shipping performance reporting actually covers

Shipping performance is not only about outbound. It is the output of receiving, inventory accuracy, picking, packing, staging, and carrier handoff. Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10 Fulfillment, described the SLA scope that shipping performance depends on. "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." When reporting includes those three segments, you can see why shipping performance is strong or weak, instead of just seeing the final score.

In D2C, shipping performance reporting should be tied to cutoffs and customer expectations. Malmquist described the common same-day promise in clock terms. "For D2C, which is an order through Shopify or on the merchant's website, if it's before noon, we're going to ship that order the same day." Reporting should show how many orders qualified for that cutoff, how many met it, and what caused misses, because that is what keeps the promise honest.

Why the definition of "shipped" is the first reporting decision

Shipping reports fail most often because "shipped" is defined too loosely. Many systems mark an order shipped when the label prints or when the order is marked complete. Customers mark it shipped when the carrier has it and tracking moves. Retailers mark it shipped when it is compliant, routed, and accompanied by the correct electronic documents.

Malmquist explained the exact gap that creates this confusion. "The reason I don't say ship is because sometimes it will be marked as completed, but the carrier doesn't actually pick it up right away, but the tracking goes back to Shopify." Shipping performance reporting should therefore include two milestones: warehouse completion time and carrier acceptance scan time. It should also report the delta between them, because that delta is where missed pickups and dock congestion hide.

On-time shipping metrics: useful, but only if they are segmented

On-time shipping is the headline metric because it is closest to a customer promise. Holly Woods, Director of Operations at G10 Fulfillment, described the performance level that is possible when processes are designed around service levels. "We currently can boast a 99.9% on time fulfillment rate." The lesson is not that every brand should promise 99.9%. The lesson is that if your SLA requires a cutoff, you need reporting that tells you daily whether you are actually meeting it.

On-time metrics should be segmented by channel, shipping method, cutoff window, and order type. A blended number can hide the exact problem customers feel, such as late same-day orders or delayed expedited shipments. Segmentation also helps you isolate whether the issue is volume, SKU complexity, staffing, or a specific carrier service level.

Cycle time reporting shows where shipping delays start

Shipping performance reports that only show the final result can lead to the wrong fixes. You need to see the internal cycle times that create the result. Pick cycle time, pack cycle time, exception time, and staging time are all leading indicators of whether the shipment will be on time.

Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described what brands hear when cycle time is out of control at a previous provider. "I hear nowadays a lot of people want to offer you know same-day fulfillment for customers who place orders before specific times, which is something we do. But then I hear a customer say, 'A previous 3PL took three days from when the order was placed to when they would ship it.'" Cycle time reporting makes that drift visible while there is still time to correct it, instead of discovering it in a weekly summary.

Accuracy reporting keeps fast shipping from becoming fast mistakes

Shipping performance is not only speed. It is also correctness. A wrong order shipped on time is not a win. It is a fast failure that triggers reships, refunds, returns, and inventory reconciliation work. That is why shipping performance reporting should include accuracy metrics in the same view as on-time metrics.

Malmquist described the level of accuracy that is hard to achieve without disciplined verification and scanning. "We have over 99.9% ship accuracy of these orders, which when you look at it on a unit level, such as unit shift versus unit errors, I almost couldn't believe it when I came here, how well we're doing on B2B shipping." Reporting should show accuracy at order, line, and unit levels, plus error types, because different error types require different fixes.

Receiving performance reporting keeps shipping from running out of inventory

One of the biggest causes of shipping delays is inventory that is physically present but not available to pick. That happens when receiving is slow or inconsistent. Shipping reports that ignore receiving are incomplete because they ignore the upstream constraint that can make outbound fail.

Malmquist described receiving SLAs in clock-based terms that map directly to reporting. "For receiving, the SLA is covers the time from the moment that we get a container on the dock with inventory in it, and how much time we have to count that in, and stow it away into the locations that we're going to pick from." A shipping performance report should therefore include receiving backlog, age on dock, and putaway completion times, because those metrics predict whether shipping will be smooth tomorrow.

B2B shipping performance reporting must include compliance milestones

If you ship to retailers, performance reporting must go beyond parcel speed. Retailers enforce routing guides, label placement, and electronic documentation timelines. A shipment can be physically on time and still be penalized if the compliance steps were wrong.

Bryan Wright, CTO and COO of G10 Fulfillment, described why B2B needs this level of measurement. "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B, which is very different." He described the compliance steps that have to be executed and tracked. "They have routing guides that make you specific labels on and put them in a specific place on the box, and you have to send EDI, ASN, electronic information in a timely fashion." Shipping performance reporting for B2B should include these milestones as on time or late, pass or fail, because that is how you prevent chargebacks instead of merely counting them.

Why scan-based tracking makes shipping reports believable

A report is only useful if everyone believes it. In a warehouse, belief comes from scan-based events, because scans record physical reality. Manual updates create timing drift, and timing drift creates arguments about whether the SLA was really met.

Wright described what strong tracking looks like inside the building. "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." He explained why that matters operationally. "At any point in time, I know that Bobby has this product on fork 10 right now, and if I needed to go find that product, I just got to go find Bobby on fork 10." When shipping reports are built from scan events, you can drill from an on-time metric to the exact order trail quickly, which is how you fix issues before they repeat.

Visibility changes shipping performance because it changes behavior

Monthly shipping reports do not prevent daily misses. Real-time visibility does. When a brand can see order stages and shipping KPIs during the day, it can prioritize correctly, communicate proactively, and avoid surprises at cutoff.

Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described what real-time portals provide customers. "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She explained how that feels in practice. "They can actually watch those progressions going on." Connor Perkins described the breadth customers should have access to. "Our clients get best-in-class visibility and transparency. They can see their daily orders, they can see KPIs, and they can see historical transactions." That visibility reduces the guesswork that makes shipping performance drift without anyone noticing.

Where G10 fits if you want shipping performance reporting you can act on

Shipping performance reporting should be specific, timely, and drillable, because shipping is where your brand promise becomes real. G10 focuses on scan-based execution, customer-facing visibility, and SLA-aligned reporting across receiving, outbound, carrier handoff, and B2B compliance milestones. The goal is fewer surprises, faster root cause analysis, and shipping performance that holds up during spikes.

If you want to see what shipping performance reporting looks like when it matches customer reality, ask for a walkthrough of a live day in the portal, including how warehouse completion differs from carrier acceptance and how exceptions are tracked. You should be able to trace one order end-to-end and see why it moved the way it moved, so you can grow without turning shipping into your biggest uncertainty.