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Comment by ericcholis | Hacker News Reader

Having worked a lot on the shipper side, it's possible that the package hasn't been picked up by the carrier yet. I've seen tracking numbers issued "client-side" that get re-issued or invalidated after pickup as well.

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IIRC there are systems to pre-generate tracking numbers that get allocated to and used by larger customers of couriers, so they can do more of the dispatch setup internally without thousands of "book this shipment and give me a tracking number" calls to the courier and they reconcile it later. That could at least get you to "this is a valid tracking number" stage, but before it's within the courier's logistics they've no way of knowing if it's active or what package it belongs to, which doesn't seem like any better of a customer experience.

If you wanted to make it universal it'd be a higher hurdle for small volume shippers, and it wouldn't surprise me if there's challenges to be overcome with a large number of outstanding 'valid but not used' tracking ids.

That is a separate state in both of these systems, though. My complaint is that a perfectly valid tracking number isn't immediately in the "awaiting pickup" state after being generated by their systems, and is instead in the scary limbo state of "I dunno, that might be an invalid tracking number".

That's exactly the issue mentioned in the post. Then show something like "not yet picked up" or "tracking number created" (a matching context for the user) instead of saying "we don't know this number" (technical context)

Here in europe that is exactly what I see, a store will show me tracking number and if I click on it carrier website says - "Label printed" so you know it is not picked up yet. DPD carrier does it like that.

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