Delivery and order tracking

The need

A parcel leaves, a customer wants to know. E-mail is not read in time, an app requires an install nobody will do for one delivery, and a phone call costs a person's time. An SMS with a tracking link is read within minutes.

The difficulty is not sending it. It is knowing whether it was useful, and handling the reply when the customer answers "I will not be there".

The setup

1. A send from your software. One HTTP call per status change: picked up, out for delivery, arrived at the pickup point. The gateway answers before the message leaves, so your code never waits on a phone.
2. A tracked short link. Turn on shorten links and every address in the text becomes a short link served by your own gateway, which counts the opens. The same address twice gets one link, shared by all the recipients of the request.
3. Clicks you can read. The count tells you whether people actually open the tracking page, which is the only honest measure of whether the message was useful.
4. The reply comes back to you. "Leave it with the neighbour", "I will collect tomorrow": the answer lands in Conversations, on the thread of that number, and your delivery team reads it.
5. A webhook if another tool must know. Every received SMS can be pushed to your order system, signed, with retries.

What to watch

The link changes the length of the message. A short link is shorter than most tracking URLs, but it is not free: GET /links returns the length of a short URL so you can compute the number of segments before sending, not after.

A short link served by you is a short link nobody else counts. The redirect runs on your gateway, so the click data never reaches a third party, and the link keeps working as long as your gateway does.

Delivery receipts are not proof. A carrier that reports nothing leaves the received count at zero while the messages arrive perfectly. Read what left, and treat confirmations as a bonus.