At a glance
A real-time alert that fires when the Australia Post label-generation success rate drops below 95 percent in the last hour. Every order that cannot get a label cannot be despatched, so a label-print failure spike is a despatch-floor stoppage in the making. The card catches the spike inside the hour so the warehouse is not discovering at end-of-day that a batch of orders never printed.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Australia Post data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A Melbourne homewares brand batch-prints Australia Post labels in three waves a day. The 10:00 wave is its biggest. Reading taken at 10:40 AEDT on 14 Apr 26, covering the 09:40 to 10:40 window.
Total label attempts in the hour: 740. Successful: 678. Success rate: 91.6 percent, below the 95 percent floor, so the alert fires. Four things to notice:
- The address-data cluster is the real signal. 38 of 62 failures are suburb-postcode mismatches, far above the trickle you would see in a normal hour. That pattern points to an upstream change: a checkout update that stopped validating addresses, a bad import of a batch of marketplace orders, or a single large order file with malformed data. The fix is upstream of Australia Post; enabling the DPID address verification API at checkout would catch most of these before they ever reach the label call.
- The charge-code failures are an account problem, not a data problem. 14 Express Post labels failing with “charge code not enabled” means the account cannot currently bill Express Post. That blocks every Express Post order until resolved with the Australia Post account team. It is a small count but a total stoppage for that product, and those are usually your highest-value, time-sensitive orders.
- Six weight-out-of-range failures are a catalogue / packing issue. A product was selected for a parcel whose weight exceeds the product’s limit. Either the packed weight is wrong in the order, or the wrong product was chosen. Cheap to fix per order, but worth checking whether one SKU is mis-weighted at source.
- Four timeouts are the platform tail. A handful of timeouts in a busy hour is within normal noise. If timeouts dominate the failure mix instead of address errors, switch attention to AusPost Tracking API Unavailable / 5xx; the problem is the carrier endpoint, not your data, and the action is to retry with backoff rather than fix order data.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Label print failures is a despatch-floor stoppage alert. Pair it with these to tell a data problem from a platform problem:Reconciling against the carrier’s own dashboard
Where to look in Australia Post’s own tooling: Label-creation errors are not a tracking-portal concept, so there is no single “failures” report in MyPost Business. The authoritative sources are the API response payloads themselves and your own labelling logs. For account-level causes (charge codes, credit hold, product enablement) check Australia Post Business → MyPost Business → Account or, for eParcel, the eParcel Customer Centre account settings. The error codes returned by the labelling endpoint are documented in the Australia Post Developer Centre. The closest like-for-like check is to count, in your own shipping-platform label log, the non-2xx responses from the Australia Post labelling endpoint over the same hour. Why our number may legitimately differ from your own label log:
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
The alert fired but my warehouse says labels are printing fine. What is happening? Look at the failure mix. If the failures are concentrated in one product (for example Express Post) the rest of your labels print fine while that one product is blocked, usually a charge-code or product-enablement issue on the account. If the failures are concentrated in one order batch or marketplace, a bad data import is the cause and the rest of the floor is unaffected. The headline success rate is below 95 percent, but the impact is rarely uniform. How do I tell a data problem from an Australia Post outage? Read the error reasons. Address-invalid, missing-field, weight-out-of-range, and charge-code errors are data or account problems on your side and the fix is in your order data or account settings. API 5xx and timeout errors are platform problems on Australia Post’s side and the fix is to retry with backoff and wait it out. If timeouts and 5xx dominate, switch to AusPost Tracking API Unavailable / 5xx. Why a 1-hour window instead of 24 hours? Speed of detection. Label printing happens in despatch waves; a regression that starts at the 10:00 wave would be diluted to near-invisibility in a 24-hour rate but is obvious in the hour it happens. The trade-off is noise: below roughly 50 label attempts in the hour a couple of failures can trip the alert, so a very low-volume merchant should read this alongside the Label Generation Success gauge for the smoother trend. Could an expired credential cause this? Yes, and it is a common silent cause. If your Australia Post API credential or token has expired, every label call fails with an authentication error and the success rate collapses to near zero. Check Days to Token Expiry first when the failure mix is uniform auth errors; renewing the credential clears the whole spike at once. A label “failed” but the customer was still charged or a label exists. How? A client-side timeout can occur after Australia Post has already created the label and reserved the article number. The label exists on their side but no PDF came back to us, so we count it as a failure. These are rare. Reconcile against your Australia Post account article list before re-creating the label, otherwise you can end up with two labels for one order. Should I retry failed labels automatically? Only for platform errors (5xx, timeout), and with exponential backoff so you do not hammer a struggling endpoint. Never auto-retry data errors (invalid address, weight out of range): the same request will fail the same way and just inflates the failure count. Route data errors to a human or back to the order for correction. Does this card include the cost of the failed despatch? No, it counts attempts and outcomes, not cost. The business cost is indirect: every failed label is a delayed despatch, which risks an OTD miss and a WISMO ticket. Pair withshopify.unfulfilled_orders to size the stuck-order backlog the spike has created.