A tracking page earns its keep by removing phone calls. It does that by answering four questions, and by not turning a guessable URL into a directory of your customers’ consignees.
Key takeaways
Four things: where the shipment is against what you promised, what changed and when, the document that proves delivery, and a route to a person. Everything else on a tracking page is decoration. The fifth requirement is negative — the page should not show more personal information than the person holding the link needs to see.
“In transit” is not a status; it is the absence of one. A useful line reads like a fact: Departed Woodstock terminal, 14 March, 06:42 ET. Next scan expected at Dorval. Time, place and time zone, because a national shipper reads your page from three of them.
Be careful with the promise half. A delivery commitment published on a page anyone can reach is a representation to the public, and section 74.01 of the Competition Act makes it reviewable conduct to make a representation to the public that is false or misleading in a material respect, by any means whatever. The same section treats a purported guarantee or a promise to continue a service until it achieves a specified result as reviewable where there is no reasonable prospect it will be carried out. A banner saying “guaranteed next-day across Ontario” sitting above a shipment that is two days late is not a marketing problem.
Let the customer search by their purchase order or their reference, not only by your pro number, because the number they have is the one their own system generated. Then state exceptions plainly: Held at consignee — no dock appointment available tells a shipper what to do. Exception code 43 does not.
A signed proof of delivery available for download the moment the load closes removes the single most common customer service request in freight, and it removes it from your accounts receivable process too, because the invoice and the document arrive at the same place at the same time.
Name the terminal and give a number or an address that is answered. A tracking page that removes most of the calls and makes the remainder impossible has not helped anybody.
Most tracking pages are unauthenticated: anyone with the link sees the shipment. That is convenient, and it is a privacy decision. Under Schedule 1 to PIPEDA, the Limiting Collection principle requires that both the amount and the type of personal information collected be limited to what is necessary for the identified purposes, and the Safeguards principle requires personal information to be protected against unauthorized access and disclosure by measures appropriate to its sensitivity — including technological measures. A consignee’s name, home address and phone number on a page reachable by incrementing a number in a URL fails that test in the simplest possible way.
The practical design rules are short. Use an unguessable token rather than a sequential number. Show an unauthenticated viewer the shipment status and a partial destination — city, not street. Put the full consignee record behind a login for the account that booked the load. If the delivery is residential, treat the address as more sensitive than a dock at a distribution centre, because it is. Treadstone Law covers whether PIPEDA applies to your business and has a privacy policy checklist for business websites that pairs with this.
An email or text telling a customer their shipment is out for delivery is a commercial electronic message, and section 6 of Canada’s anti-spam legislation normally requires consent. Subsection 6(6) removes the consent requirement for a message that solely facilitates, completes or confirms a commercial transaction the recipient previously agreed to enter into, or that solely provides notification of factual information about the ongoing use or purchase of a service under an existing relationship. Shipment status sits squarely inside that.
The word doing the work is “solely”. Add a promotion for your new temperature-controlled lane to the bottom of a delivery notification and the exception is gone. Keep the identification and contact information required by subsection 6(2) accurate in any event — contact information must stay valid for at least 60 days after the message is sent — and where an unsubscribe applies, section 11 requires it to be honoured without delay and in any event within 10 business days. The maximum administrative monetary penalty is $10,000,000 for a person that is not an individual, which is the CRTC’s answer to anyone who treats this as paperwork. The CRTC administers it.
An interprovincial carrier operates an undertaking within the legislative authority of Parliament, which puts it inside paragraph 7(1)(e) of the Accessible Canada Act. The Accessible Canada Regulations exempt a regulated entity averaging fewer than ten employees, but above that the entity must publish an accessibility plan — and section 6 of the regulations requires it to be published in a format meeting Level AA conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, on the main digital platform the entity uses to communicate with the public, reachable directly from the home page or by a hyperlink from it. The same standard applies to the description of the feedback process and to progress reports.
The tracking page is not itself the accessibility plan. But a carrier that must publish WCAG Level AA documents on its website should not be commissioning a status page that a screen reader cannot read, and the two projects are cheaper done together than sequentially.
Worked example: the page that answered nothing
A 3PL in Ontario builds a tracking page. It shows a status word and a date. The most common status is “In transit”.
Call volume does not fall. The customer service log shows why: every call begins “your site says in transit, where is it actually?” The page removed no work because it did not answer the question that was being asked.
The rebuild changes four things. The last scan gets a time, a place and a time zone. The search box accepts the customer’s purchase order. The proof of delivery appears as a download the moment the load closes. Exceptions are written in words rather than codes.
The link itself changes too. Tracking used to be /track?id=10457, which meant /track?id=10458 was somebody else’s consignee. It becomes a random token, and the street address only appears to a signed-in account.
Generally no, where the message solely facilitates, completes or confirms a transaction the recipient previously agreed to enter into, or solely provides factual information about an ongoing service relationship. Adding marketing content to the same message removes the exception.
Treat it as personal information and apply PIPEDA’s limiting collection and safeguards principles: show the minimum an unauthenticated viewer needs, and put the full record behind an account.
A hybrid works well — a token link that shows status and city, with full detail and documents behind the account that booked the shipment.
An interprovincial carrier is a federally regulated entity under the Accessible Canada Act. Above the ten-employee threshold in the regulations, its accessibility plan, feedback process description and progress reports must be published on its main public digital platform in a format meeting WCAG Level AA.
We help Canadian carriers and 3PLs turn status data into a customer-facing page that answers the question before the phone rings.
