Summary: Most rows in your report's Tracking Status column show a timeout. The carrier did not answer the nightly tracking job in time. Nothing is wrong with your shipments or your account. Re-run the job from Ship > Utilities > Update Tracking Status and the real statuses come through.

Problem

You run a tracking report over a date range and most rows show this in the Tracking Status column, while a few show real statuses:

The request channel timed out while waiting for a reply

If you open one of those shipments in Shipment History and click Track, the status comes back correctly.

Cause

The Tracking Status column is filled in by a job that runs each night and asks the carrier for the status of every shipment. When the carrier or its tracking provider is slow, briefly unavailable, or limiting how fast it answers a busy account, those individual requests run out of time and the job stores the timeout wording in the column instead of a status.

It is temporary and it is on the carrier side. USPS shipments tracked through Endicia are the common case, because a high-volume account sends a lot of requests at once.

How to check: open one affected shipment in Shipment History and click Track. If the status comes back right away on its own, the nightly job simply timed out. Your account and your saved sign-in details are fine.

Fix

  1. Open one affected shipment in Shipment History and click Track to confirm the status comes back on demand.
  2. Go to Ship > Utilities > Update Tracking Status and run the job.
  3. Let it finish. On a busy account this takes a while, so do not start it again while it is running.
  4. Run your report again and check the Tracking Status column.

What you should see

The Tracking Status column shows real statuses such as Delivered or In Transit instead of the timeout wording, and an on-demand Track on any of those shipments returns a status with no message.

If something goes wrong

The same shipments keep timing out across several runs. The carrier may be limiting how fast it answers your account. Space the runs further apart, and email support@shipstore.com with your company name and a few of the shipment numbers so we can confirm whether the carrier is limiting you.

The column reads Error instead of a timeout. That is a different cause, usually a carrier account that is not set up for tracking. See the related article.

The same timeout wording appears while loading orders, not tracking. That is a different problem. See the related article on order load timeouts.

Related articles

  • Report shows Error in the Tracking Status column
  • Veracore order load times out: 'request channel timed out'
  • Build a shipment report: station filter, LTL counts, blank ship-to