How we measure delivery speed

What is recorded

An order leaves three marks in the system: payment confirmed, the order accepted by the delivery partner that fulfils it, and that partner reporting it delivered. Nothing reads the account or the post, so there is no record of when the first follower, like or view appears, and no figure for it anywhere on this site.

Hand-off

Hand-off is the time between confirmed payment and the delivery partner accepting the order. On paid orders in the 30 days to 2026-09-22, the median hand-off was under one second.

When a partner's system rejects an order, the item goes back in the queue and is tried again, up to three attempts in all. Some packages carry a second partner service as a backup, and it is used when the first attempt fails.

Completion

The order system asks the delivery partner how open orders are progressing and marks an item delivered when the partner reports it complete. If the partner calls an order complete while less than 95% of the ordered amount was delivered, the order is held at partial instead.

A completion time is the moment the system saw the partner's report, not the moment the last unit arrived, so it reads late rather than early.

The time shown next to a package

The package picker shows the time by which half of recent orders of that size had finished. It reads orders paid between 7 and 37 days ago, needs at least 30 of them before it shows anything, and measures from payment to the last recorded completion in the order. It describes what those orders did; it is not a commitment for yours.

Orders that run late

Every ten minutes a check compares open paid orders with the delivery window set for their package and flags the ones that are late, stuck before hand-off, partly delivered, failed or cancelled. The flags go to our team, as an alert for the worst and a daily digest for the rest. The order itself does not change on its own.

What is not measured here

• When units start appearing on the account or the post. No part of the system reads them.
• The pace at which units arrive between the hand-off and completion.
• Any other service's delivery speed.