When a Delivery Fails: Retry and Return

When cargo cannot be collected or delivered, Orbit records what happened and offers you two ways forward: run the delivery again, or send the cargo back. The shipment recovers by itself once you choose.

Overview

A failed delivery is a recorded outcome, not a broken record. The driver reports what happened to each item, Orbit keeps that account, and you decide what to do next.

Recovery happens on a shipment's Leg: the stage of the journey that was carrying the cargo. On a shipment that goes straight from pickup to dropoff, that leg is the whole journey. The Legs article covers them in their own right.

Key highlights

• Reported per item — A driver marks each load separately, so part of a delivery can succeed while part of it fails.

• Two ways forward — Retry the leg, or move the cargo onto a return shipment.

• The shipment recovers itself — There is no failure to clear by hand once you have acted.

• Stranded cargo too — Goods left at a hub by a cancellation come back the same way.

• Nothing is overwritten — The failed attempt stays in the record after you recover from it.

How a failure is recorded

Failure is reported by the driver, item by item. At a stop, each load is marked either as handled or as failed, and a failed load takes a reason: Load Damaged, Load Missing, Load Refused, or Other, with an optional comment. A load that could not be collected reads Not Loaded. One that could not be delivered reads Not Unloaded.

Because reporting is per item, a leg only counts as failed when every load on it failed. If a driver delivers four pallets and cannot deliver the fifth, the leg still counts as delivered, and the one pallet carries the failure. This decides what Orbit offers you next.

Where failures appear

On any shipment, look at the loads on the shipment's page. A load that failed carries a red status badge, and opening its entry shows what happened along with the actions available.

On a shipment carried in legs, the failure also appears on the leg that was carrying the cargo. The Legs section shows a red Failed badge: point at it to see which loads failed and why, with the same actions to hand. You can also right-click the leg's row, or open the leg's own page and use its Actions menu.

An orange badge reading Stranded at hub is a different situation, covered below.

Retrying

A retry is a fresh attempt at the same leg. Orbit resets it to Unrouted, clears the tour it was on, and puts its loads back to Routed, waiting to be carried again. The recorded arrival and departure times go with them, because the attempt they described is being made again.

Choose Retry Leg and Orbit asks for three things, all optional: a new delivery time window if the original has passed, a reason, and a tour to route the leg onto straight away. Leave the tour unset and the leg comes back plannable rather than planned.

A retry runs the whole leg again. Every load on it goes back to Routed, including any that were delivered successfully. That is right when a whole delivery failed and has to be run again, and wrong when only part of it did, because it would send cargo that already arrived back out a second time. So when a leg delivered some of its cargo and failed the rest, Orbit does not offer a retry at all. It offers a return, which acts on the failed item alone.

Creating a return shipment

A return moves cargo that cannot continue onto a shipment of its own, running from wherever the goods currently sit to a place you choose.

This is a genuine new Shipment, not a note on the old one, with its own pickup, dropoff and status, planned and carried like any other. Orbit links the two so the trail is never lost: the original load points forward to the return, the return back to the shipment it came from, each as a button you can follow.

Choose Create Return Shipment and Orbit shows you the failed load and where it currently is, then asks for a return target: any of your organisation's own locations, described in the Global Addresses & Cross-Dock Hubs article, or one of the customer's. This is the only thing you must supply. A reason is optional and is kept in the record.

You return one load at a time, so you can send a single item back while retrying or replanning the rest.

Cargo stranded at a hub

Cargo can also come to rest without anything having failed. If a shipment is cancelled while its goods sit at a hub part-way through their journey, the leg holding them shows an orange Stranded at hub badge. Nothing was reported as failed and the goods are not lost: the journey they were booked for no longer exists.

Recovering them works exactly as a return does. Create a return shipment from the hub to wherever the goods should go.

What happens to the shipment

A shipment reflects the state of its cargo, so it recovers on its own as you act. Retry a failed leg and the shipment stops reading Failed once the cargo is waiting to travel again. Return a load and the same happens, because that item's obligation has moved to the return shipment.

If every load ends up returned, the shipment closes as Cancelled rather than Failed. Nothing is left to carry, so it is not a delivery that went wrong but one that is no longer being made.

One case reads oddly at first. Cancelling a shipment while a driver is part-way through it leaves the leg they were running marked Failed, so a failure appears on a shipment nobody failed. It is a faithful record of a movement stopped mid-flight, not a second problem to solve.

The record of what happened

Everything you do here is written to the leg's history, on the leg's own page: Leg failed, Retried, Load returned, each with whoever acted, when, and the reason they gave. Recovering never overwrites what came before it, so the failed attempt stays readable long after the cargo has been delivered.

What your customer sees

In Orbit Hub, a failed load shows as failed once the tour has been reviewed, and so does a returned one: from the customer's point of view the item did not arrive, which remains true whatever you have arranged behind it.

Orbit notifies nobody that a delivery has failed. There is no automatic email or push, so telling the customer stays with you.

For administrators: completing a leg without a driver report

This is not a recovery action and does not apply to a failed delivery. It is for the opposite problem: a leg that was carried but never reported, where the goods arrived and the driver's report never did.

Complete Leg Manually is offered only on a leg in transit, never on one that has failed. It marks the leg as delivered and requires a reason, recorded permanently against it.

It cannot be used to overrule a driver. Loads the driver marked as failed keep their failure, as do loads already returned. Manual completion fills in what was never reported and nothing else. It is available to administrators only, in Orbit MissionControl, and cannot be carried out through the API.

Example

Spaceport Shipping Co. books six crates from Lisbon to Warsaw through a hub in Berlin. On the second leg the customer refuses one crate as damaged and takes the other five, so the leg counts as delivered and the damaged crate reads Not Unloaded. Mohammad, an operator, opens the load and sees that a retry is not offered, because five crates have already arrived. He creates a return shipment for the damaged crate back to the Berlin hub, planned onto a tour the next morning. The original shipment stops reading Failed, and both records point at each other for anyone who asks later.

Frequently asked questions