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Metrics type: Key MetricsCategory: Marketplace

At a glance

Pending Shipment counts orders that buyers have paid for but you have not yet dispatched. On JD this number is not just a to-do list, it is a live risk gauge. Every paid order sits against a JD ship-deadline window, and a backlog that climbs above roughly twice your 30-day average is the clearest leading indicator that fulfilment is bottlenecking and the Logistics DSR is about to take a hit. Chinese buyers expect movement fast, so an unshipped pile turns into late dispatches, then negative Logistics ratings, then lost search ranking. This is a hero card in the Fulfilment family and reads best beside the dispatch-rate, SLA, and late-dispatch cards below.

Calculation

A real-time count of orders in the paid-but-not-dispatched state at the moment of reading. The alert compares this live count to the trailing 30-day average backlog: crossing twice that average trips it. Orders move out of the count the instant a dispatch scan is recorded, so the figure falls as you ship. Cancelled-before-dispatch orders drop out without counting as shipped. Both JD Logistics handover-pending and POP self-fulfilled pending orders are included, since both face a ship-deadline.

Worked example

A representative reading of Pending Shipment for a typical merchant on JD.com. Suppose your 30-day average backlog is about 60 orders. This morning the card reads 145, well past the 2x line of 120, and the alert is red. Checking orders-per-day shows a flash promotion doubled intake yesterday, while the dispatch rate held flat, so the backlog is an intake spike the warehouse has not absorbed. The clock matters: several of those orders are within hours of their JD ship-deadline, and missing it would hit the Logistics DSR. The action is immediate, surge dispatch capacity onto the oldest orders first to clear the at-deadline ones, then plan staffing against the next promotion’s expected peak. For deeper investigation, use Vortex Mind to rank pending orders by time-to-deadline; for natural-language exploration, ask Ask Viq “how many pending orders are within four hours of their JD ship-deadline”.

Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in JD.com’s own dashboard: JD’s Seller Centre order-management view lists orders by status, and the pending-shipment or to-be-shipped queue is the direct equivalent. The count there should match this card at the same moment, allowing for refresh lag. Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ: Cross-connector reconciliation: read with orders-per-day to separate an intake spike from a dispatch stall, and with the dispatch-rate card to confirm capacity. For divergence investigations, use Vortex Mind.

Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Q: How often does Pending Shipment update? It is a real-time count, recomputed on every refresh (typically every 30-60 minutes for live integrations). Because it changes as you ship, force a manual refresh during a busy dispatch run for an up-to-the-second figure. Q: Why does my JD.com dashboard show a different number? The usual causes are refresh timing (orders shipped between syncs still show here), the status definition (whether awaiting-payment or on-hold orders are counted), and fulfilment scope (JD Logistics vs POP queues). Match those before assuming a real divergence. Q: The backlog spiked but my team shipped normally. What happened? Almost always an intake spike rather than a dispatch stall. Check orders-per-day: a promotion or festival can double intake overnight, so a steady dispatch rate still leaves a temporary pile. Prioritise the orders closest to their ship-deadline first. Q: Can I customise the alert threshold? Yes, the multiple of the 30-day average (default 2x) is configurable per profile in the Alert Rules tab. Lower it if your ship-deadlines are tight, or raise it for categories with naturally lumpy intake so routine promotion spikes do not over-alert.

Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Pending Shipment is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across JD.com and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.