When a Delivery Fails: What to Do Next

When cargo cannot be collected or delivered, Orbit records what happened and offers you a way forward: run the delivery again, deliver the missing part to the receiver later, or send the cargo back. Where the goods actually are decides which of those you are offered, so cargo still aboard the vehicle is recorded at a hub first. 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.

• Ways forward — Retry the leg, redeliver the missing part to the receiver, send the cargo back, or write the goods off when they will never travel again.

• Where the goods are decides the options — Cargo refused at the door is still aboard the vehicle, so it is recorded at a hub before it can be redelivered or returned.

• 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 redelivery or a return instead, which acts on the failed item alone.

A retry also assumes the cargo is waiting at the leg's pickup. Cargo the receiver turned away is not: it is still aboard the vehicle. Putting those loads back to Routed would tell everyone downstream that they are waiting at an address they left hours ago, so Orbit withholds both the retry and the return until you record where the goods were actually put down. The next section covers that. This applies where your organisation has at least one cross-dock hub; without one there is nowhere to record an unload, so the earlier behaviour stands.

Redelivering or returning cargo

A redelivery and a return are the same movement: cargo that cannot continue travels on a shipment of its own, running from wherever the goods currently sit to a place you choose. Where you send it is what separates the two. Send it to the original receiver and it is a redelivery, the missing part of the order arriving later than the rest. Send it anywhere else and it is a return.

Either way 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 new shipment, the new shipment back to the one it came from, each as a button you can follow. Its badge reads Redelivery when it still ends at the original receiver, and Return Shipment when it does not.

Choose Redeliver or Return and Orbit shows you the failed load and where it currently is, then asks where it should go. The receiver comes first in the list and is already selected, so sending the missing part on to the address it was always going to needs no further choice. The other targets are any of your organisation's own locations, described in the Global Addresses & Cross-Dock Hubs article, or one of the customer's saved addresses. Choosing one of those switches the dialog from a redelivery to a return. A reason is optional and is kept in the record.

The receiver is offered only while the goods are somewhere else. If they failed at the receiver's own door, redelivering there would be a journey from an address to itself, so Orbit leaves the option out. What comes next depends on where the goods went after the refusal: record them at a hub, as the next section describes, and the full choice opens up from there.

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

Cargo the receiver refused

A load the receiver turned away never left the vehicle. It reads Not Unloaded, but the address on that failed stop is where the delivery was attempted, not where the goods are. Until Orbit is told where they were put down, it will not offer a retry or a return, because both would act on a place the cargo is not.

Recording it is a single step. On the failed load, choose Unloaded at Hub. Orbit shows the refused load and the cross-dock hubs your organisation has configured, described in the Global Addresses & Cross-Dock Hubs article. Pick the hub the goods were left at, give the time they were dropped if you know it, and confirm.

Orbit then records the movement that actually happened: a stage running from the failed dropoff to that hub, marked delivered, with the load reading Carried Back. The failed attempt stays exactly as it was — the refusal, its reason and its comment are part of the record and are never rewritten. The cargo itself reads At Hub.

A driver can also report it as they go. If the tour calls at one of your cross-dock hubs later the same day, the refused load appears there under its own heading, apart from the work scheduled for that stop, and the driver ticks it off when they drop it. The Load Status Tracking article covers that side of it.

Moving on from the hub

Once the cargo reads At Hub it has a real position again, and two ways forward open from it. Deliver Again sends it from the hub to the receiver it was always going to, as a fresh stage you can plan onto a tour; you may set a delivery window if the original has passed. Redeliver or Return behaves exactly as described above, starting from the hub rather than the receiver's door.

A retry is not offered on cargo waiting at a hub, and is not needed: the attempt that failed is finished, and Deliver Again is the second attempt.

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 redelivery or a return does. From the hub, send them on to the receiver they were booked for, or back to wherever they should go.

Goods that will not travel again

A redelivery and a return both assume the goods still have to be moved somewhere. Sometimes they do not: a pallet has spoiled, or a crate cannot be found anywhere at all. Goods like those are written off instead, against the single Load they concern. A write-off records the outcome and moves nothing, so no return shipment, no further stop and no onward transport comes out of it. The Shipment then closes as undeliverable, and loads on it that were delivered stay delivered.

The Writing Off Goods That Cannot Be Delivered article covers the reasons you can record, what becomes of the goods in stock, and how a write-off is undone.

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. Redeliver or return a load and the same happens, because that item's obligation has moved to the new shipment.

Recording an unload at a hub does the same thing for a different reason. The cargo has not been delivered and nothing has taken the obligation over, but it is no longer stuck at a failed attempt: it is sitting somewhere real, waiting for you to decide. The load reads At Hub, and the shipment follows it.

If every load ends up moved onto a new shipment, the original 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, and the unload recorded at a hub, 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. The crate stays on the vehicle, and the driver drops it at the Berlin hub on the way back, ticking it off there. Mohammad, an operator, opens the load the next morning and finds it reading At Hub. Because the crate has a position again, he can act on it: he chooses Redeliver or Return and sends it from Berlin back to the supplier. The original shipment stops reading Failed, and both records point at each other for anyone who asks later.

An earlier booking went differently. One of the six crates was never loaded at the Berlin hub while the other five travelled on, so the missing crate stayed at the hub rather than reaching Warsaw. Julia opened the failed load, found the receiver already selected as the target, and created a redelivery that carried the sixth crate to Warsaw two days behind the rest.

Frequently asked questions