trackmyshipments.com’s blog

It’s always great when you work on a product and then it’s released to users and they love it as much as you hoped they would.

We had a 5/5 Star Review on the App Store today which really put across well what type of experience we’re trying to bring to TrackMyShipments iPhone:

I have been waiting for a while for a good shipment tracking application and finally this one is available. It is a great app and does exactly what it says. Once I forwarded my “shipment” email to them it was updated within 2-3 minutes. Very quick. I emailed tech support with a question and had an email back within 5 minutes. If you are looking for a good app to track shipments I highly recommend this one.

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded TrackMyShipments iPhone so far.

If you have any product comments or suggestions, please let us know.

TrackMyShipments is now available on the App Store on your iPhone, iPod Touch &/or from iTunes.

We’ve been working on it for a couple of months and are super happy with this 1st version.

I hope you’ll support us and download a copy.

I’d love to hear from you with any suggestions for features etc.

Yes, that’s right! We’re working on a version of TrackMyShipments for iPhone. We hope to have it finished and available on the iPhone Application Store by the start of September - watch this space!

We’ve had a couple of great new online mentions recently.

A really nice write-up on associatedcontent.com (here) and on pcmech.com (here).

Things here are going great. We are regularly tracking multiple thousands of shipments at any one time, and our user numbers are climbing nicely.

We expect much growth as the summer ends and the Holidays start.

TrackMyShipments starts charging for some features today.

As you can see above, the main differences between a FREE and PRO account are the number of shipments that can be tracked at any one time, and SMS Shipment Status Updates.

We’re using PayPal for our subscriptions for security and ease-of-use.

We will use this income to continue to improve the service.

(Note that all users who have signed up before tonight will get the SMS Shipment Status Updates feature for Free for 12 months as a ‘thank you’ for being an early user of TrackMyShipments)

Users often ask me ‘How often do you check shipments?’.

The answer is a complex one. The quickest answer is that we’re always adjusting our algorithms to get the best performance without our servers constantly shouting ‘HEY - what’s happening with shipment X’ to the shipping companies’ servers.

The situation we’re aiming at is where you hear a thump on your doorstep and your email pings with a new status email from TrackMyShipments telling you that the shipment has arrived.

In most situations this is what actually happens!

In some we can’t achieve this level of service because either our servers are temporarily overloaded (something we’re always adjusting and improving) or the shipping company doesn’t update its servers immediately.

Perhaps we’re setting our sights too high, but that ‘thump & ping’ is what we’re aiming at.

Yesterday we had a brief period in the afternoon and early evening when our incoming email server wasn’t processing email. This caused some delays in accepting new shipments, but everything was queued up outside our systems and nothing was lost.

Everything is up and running again now without any problems.

Fox 16, the Fox affiliate in Little Rock, AR, had this great mention of TrackMyShipments this week:

It’s a great thrill to see our product on TV, and Fox16 did such a great job!

Today we’ve finished implementing a new feature: Associate Accounts.

Associates lets you send in tracking requests from 2 or more email addresses, and they’ll get listed in your main TrackMyShipments’ account.

To add an Associate email address, send an email to track@trackmyshipments.com with this in the body of the email:

Just re-reading the comments on our mention on Techcrunch in February and noticed this comment by ‘Jon’:

my hobby is radio control , and each new model i build often involves a number shipments from different vendors (e.g., a radio, a battery pack, the model itself, servos, etc.) luckily for my personal productivity, trackmyshipments came before i finally gave in and tried to make it myself.

as for whether TMS is around in 6 months, i hope it is. but if it isn’t i’ll just have to go back to what i was doing before (checking tracking via emails in a folder), or maybe explore one of the RSS, etc., approaches mentioned above. HOWEVER, unlike many other new sites i consider using, there’s no risk for me with TMS. at any given time, i might care about 3 or 4 shipments — but only until they’re delivered. TMS is immediately useful to me, all for just forwarding one email per package i’m interested in.

nice work, and thanx andrew!

To me, tha’s the perfect use and the reason that I developed TrackMyShipments.

Thanks Jon 

It’s been a great week! We started with X users on Monday and everything running great. Then Kim Komando was kind enough to mention us as her ‘Website Of The Day’ and over the next 4 days, our users have jumped to 2X! As I said, Kim Komando is our hero!

Then yesterday the number of shipments being tracked by all those users caused some server problems (now nicely fixed).

And we finish Friday with a visit to Borders Books on a balmy Friday evening (80+ in April!) and buy some copies of the latest PC World magazine (May issue) with the article about 101 Best Web Freebies mentioning TrackMyShipments on p84. Always a wonderful feeling to see your product in print and with a great write-up.

So - a good week all around.

We’re been having problems this morning with outgoing Status Emails and SMS Text Messages. We’re working on the problem now and will update here when we fix the problem.

Any questions, please email us at info@trackmyshipments.com

-Andrew

7:40pm PST: We’re back up and running now. Some Status emails were delayed, but the backlog is mostly worked thru’ now. Apologies for today. The problem was the the influx of shipments from our new users this week caused a couple of dormant bugs to show up.

11:45pm PST:  Just been cleaning up today’s ‘repairs’. It’s funny how a bug showing up can often force you to write a really nice solution which allows for the next leap in users & shipments - part of the fun of programming.

Kim Komando’s Radio Show is heard on over 450 stations around the USA. Her 3 hours of phone-in chat every week brings technology news and explanation to America. To her fans she is a Goddess.

Today we were very lucky to be named her ‘Website Of The Day’ - an Honor indeed.

In her newsletter and on her website, Kim was kind enough to say “It’s no secret that I like to shop online. Great deals are available on virtually anything. You can shop online at all hours of the day, no matter where you are. And, you don’t have to face crowded stores and long lines. Of course, there is a downside to online shopping. It can be difficult to track shipping. You need to remember tracking numbers and log onto different sites.

That’s why I use TrackMyShipments. When I get a shipping confirmation e-mail, I simply forward it to TrackMyShipments. Then, I can log on to my account at TrackMyShipments. All my shipping confirmations are in one place. A map helps me see from whence a package is shipping. I can also see details about its progress. TrackMyShipments is a great site for anyone who likes to shop online. Give it a try!”

Thank you Kim for those kind words and a VERY BIG THANKYOU for our best day of traffic and new user signups. Today was our best day ever by more than double!

Kim’s Editor was kind enough to warn us about the influx of hits and we were able to upgrade our servers in time for today’s mention and handle the traffic without any issues.

I hope that all our new users are enjoying the TrackMyShipments service.

-Andrew

Highly respected PCWorld magazine just named TrackMyShipments in their 101 Fantastic Freebies article in their May Issue (due out April 15th)! Wow!

The PCWorld online article is here.

“Each download or service on the list impressed the editors with its functionality and usability,” said Harry McCracken, VP/editor in chief of PC World.

We’ve also had mentions today in InfoWorld, and StreetInsider.com.

We’re up to thousands of users tracking hundreds of packages at any one time now, and hopefully the above mentions will bring us many more happy users.

Many thanks to everyone at PCWorld for this honor.

It’s been about 8 weeks since TrackMyShipments launched and we now have thousands of users tracking many hundreds of US Domestic and International shipments every day.

We recently added some features that I wanted you to know about:

UPDATE RATES FOR EMAIL AND SMS MESSAGES
Update Rates allows you to set the rate at which you get email and SMS updates. You’re now able to set:

• All Updates
• Day Of Delivery & Exceptions
• Delivered & Exceptions
• None

Exceptions are any issues which cause delays in delivery of the shipment.

These are global and apply to every shipment that you’re tracking. (of course you’ll be able to get the latest information at any time by emailing ‘tmssummary’ to track@trackmyshipments.com as usual).

Update Rates can dramatically cut down the number of emails and SMS that you receive, but still keep you fully informed. Or…if you’re an information-nut like me, you can keep ‘All Updates’ and get every single movement update as usual.

You can set the Update Rates on the Account Page of your account. (Log on and click on ‘Account’ to the left of the Map page).

SMS TEXT MESSAGES
We have finally finished testing our SMS Text message service. You can now get SMS Text message updates on any shipment that you choose.

To do this:

1. Log into TrackMyShipments
2. Enter your Cell Phone number on the Account page
3. Enter the 4 digit Activation code sent to your cell phone
4. Set the Global Update rate for SMS Text messages on your Account page
5. Click on a shipment in the table under the map
6. Click on ‘SMS Alert’ and then ‘Change’

Now that shipment will generate SMS Text message updates.

EDIT ‘COMPANY’
Sometimes our automated system picks up the wrong or no Company Name for a shipment.

You can now edit the Company Name on the Shipments/Map page when you log in to see your shipments.

HIDE MAP
Some of our power users who are tracking many tens of shipments have asked to be able to see more shipments without having to scroll the shipment table when they log on. You can now hide the Map and see many more shipments in the table by using the new ‘Hide Map’ option on your Account page.

Thank you for using TrackMyShipments.

If you have any questions and/or suggestions for the above or new
features, please email us at info@trackmyshipments.com

In the next couple of weeks, we’ll be releasing a new feature (Update Rates) which allows you to set the rate at which you get email updates. You’ll be able to set:

• All Updates
• Day Of Delivery & Problems
• Delivered & Problems
• None

These will be global and apply to every shipment that you’re tracking. (of course you’ll be able to get the latest information at any time by emailing ‘tmssummary’ to track@ as usual).

We already have the above working here and it’s in final testing. It can dramatically cut down the number of emails you receive, but still keep you fully informed. Or…if you’re an information-nut, you can keep ‘All Updates’ and get every single movement update as usual.

I’d like to have a few users testing this new system for us, so if you’d like to help test Update Rates please send an email to info@trackmyshipments.com and tell us what Update Rate you’d like your account to be set to.

I suppose it’s a right-of-passage, but we’re having our first server problem…in this case, the TrackMyShipments system is sending email OK, but not receiving it!

If you’ve had any shipment requests, they should be queued up outside our server and come flooding in as soon as the guys at our hosting company get things fixed.

My apologies for this problem - I’ll keep you updated here.

13:00 PST Friday: Everything is fixed. Our hosting company did an upgrade last night which really messed up incoming email. Luckily the emails were all queued outside and are now streaming in and being processed. Outgoing status update emails weren’t effected. My apologies for the delays. If you have any questions, please contact us at info@trackmyshipments.com

Today we’ve implemented 2 upgrades to the TrackMyShipments service:

• ‘Guessimated Day Of Delivery’: We get many packages where the shipper doesn’t give an Estimated Delivery Date. We’ve implementing a system to, initially, tell you that a shipment will be delivered ‘Today’ and eventually we hope to be able to warn you 1 or 2 days out. The 1st pass of this system went live today.
• ‘tmscompany’: When you manually enter a shipment, up until now the Company for that shipment was messily listed as ‘NONE’. Now if you put the secret word tmscompany in your email, the next word becomes the Company name for that shipment. So, now to manually enter a shipment, you send an email to track@trackmyshipments.com with the following contents:

We’re adding more features and cleanups over the next couple of weeks, I’ll keep you updated.

We’re working on a few updates. This is a brief overview:

• ‘Guessimated Day Of Delivery’: We get many packages where the shipper doesn’t give an Estimated Delivery Address. We’re implementing a system to, initially, tell you that a shipment will be delivered ‘Today’ and eventually we hope to be able to warn you 1 or 2 days out.
• User Update Rate: At the moment you get an email about every movement of every shipment you’re tracking. We’re adding global settings so that you can, for example, say that for every shipment you only want ‘Day Of Delivery And Exceptions’. Exceptions are any problem where there is a delay (eg Customs) to a shipment. This will dramatically cut down the amount of email you get, whilst keeping you fully informed. Of course you can leave the setting as ‘All Updates’ if you wish.

I’ll reveal more over the next few days.

TrackMyShipments just got mentioned on the BizTechPodcast! Our first podcast mention! The link is here.

…have a listen - it’s cool!

It’s been a very interesting 24 hours since we were mentioned on lifehacker.com!

User numbers have risen by over 300% from yesterday morning’s total, and we’re tracking over 10x as many shipments!

We even some users tracking 20+ shipments!!

So - GREAT NEWS all round!

Tonight the excellent lifehacker.com which follows life-simplifying websites mentioned TrackMyShipments. The link is here.

Our user signups have taken a big leap up in the last couple of hours, and the system is coping very well.

Welcome to all our new users - I hope you like the service and find it useful.

And Thanks to Adam and Gina at LifeHackers.

We believe that great customer service is pro-active.

If you have an impatient customer or a shipment is delayed or goes missing (or is perhaps just delivered successfully to the customer’s shy neighbor), then your customer is forced to find out what happened.

Your customer is forced to search through their emails, cut & paste the original tracking number into the shipping company’s website and track their shipment. Even if you include a link in your shipping emails which does this automatically, the customer still has to find that original email.

Even worse, your customer might try to contact you directly taking your time and costing you money.

TrackMyShipment’s White Label service allows your shipping system to pro-actively keep your customer super-informed, and in our experience, a super-informed customer is a happier customer!

So - starting today we’re offering White Label Tracking - contact me for more information.

And here is a write up on Techcrunch Japan.

It’s been a fun 24 hours since we were mentioned on Techcrunch. In the end we were their headline story for about 4 hours - highly unusual and really great PR.

The permalink for the Techcrunch mention is here.

We’ve also had some other mentions, such as this one on RPM’s
Blog.

There have been various issues and we’ve improved the Mail Stripping algorithm a few times in the last 24 hours and it should be much better now.

We’ve also had some very nice comments from users, here are some examples from Techcrunch:

Alex - January 23rd, 2008 at 7:04 am
I don’t get why so many people are calling fail- Here’s why I think this site will do fine:

1) An ad-sense based site completely removes the user’s bank account from the business model, so traffic (and therefor profit) are based entirely on usefulness.

2) It’s useful.

To answer the question in the post, “although I can’t help that wonder exactly how many people have soo many packages on the way that they need a centralized management service for them.” - I plan on using it a lot, and I never have more than 1 or 2 packages being shipped to me simultaneously. The main thing convenience for me here isn’t so much multiple simultaneous trackers, but multiple company trackers ON ONE SITE. I can ditch all my fedex/usps/ups/hong kong air tracking bookmarks, and replace them all with that one. I won’t have to look up an email to remember how my next package is shipping so I can go to the corresponding tracker website. Just go to this site.

It’s kind of like putting feeds in Google Reader - Even if you don’t read all your feeds all the time, it’s still handy to only have one destination address to get all the information you’re looking for.

Morgan - January 22nd, 2008 at 5:45 pm
even with only a few shipments, so long as I don’t need to login every time, I’d use it. I constantly am searching Gmail for my tracking emails, sometimes I’ve deleted them, sometimes I’ve forgotten the titles, etc. Nice idea– not revolutionary but nice.

and by email….

Jason - Jan 23 2008
Hey Guys… nice work! I just signed up for your service and gotta tell you that this site and service is a brilliant idea. I just wish I would have thought of it on my own…! Really nice to see this come together, I look forward to utilizing the services and thanks again!

So - all great news so far.

We were honored to be mentioned on Techcrunch (www.techcrunch.com) tonight.

It’s extremely fun to read everyone’s comments and see the database and tracking engine come alive as we get lots of new users.

Thanks to Michael, Duncan and Heather over there in Palo Alto - the mention is very much appreciated.

-Andrew

TrackMyShipments is up and live! A lot of work has gone into this and I’m sure that more will go into it in the next few days. It’s great to finally have it out there. Now to make a LARGE cup of celebratory tea!

-Andrew

The headline says it all…we’re putting the final touches to everything and getting ready to launch on Monday!

It’s highly interesting working on a shipment tracking system - everything suddenly has ‘Tracking Potential’ !

You find yourself shopping for shoes in a store like you normally would and then realizing that you could use this purchase as a test case for TrackMyShipments - that this purchase has Tracking Potential!

So - you write down the shoe make, style and size and rush home and order the shoes from Zappos.com to give the system another Beta shipment to play with. [TrackMyShipments handled the zappos order great by the way, and the shoes are wonderful too!].

For our home page we’ll be using these great icons:

They’re by Leo Blanchette and I think illustrate our ‘mission’ really well:

• You are weighed down with shipment worries
• TrackMyShipments automatically tracks all your shipments
  in one place
• You can relax

More of Leo’s work can be found at: www.jesterarts.net

(On another note, we’re days from launching - it’s getting very exciting around here just polishing and honing everything)

Merry Christmas to everyone.

In late November I was debating whether to rush and get the system and website live before Christmas - the busiest shipping time of the year. It would have been a great time to really showcase TrackMyShipments - if everything had gone well! In the end I decided it was too much of a risk, so we’ve spent the last month testing everything with a small group of private Beta Testers.

As Christmas rolls around tomorrow, I’m glad to say that our Beta testers have found the system really useful - it seems to have removed that well-known panic about business shipments and presents arriving on time. The testers have quickly come to trust TrackMyshipments to keep them informed about important shipments - no email from TrackMyShipments means no news about a shipment, but ‘someone’ is watching! If they haven’t heard anything for a while, they can send a request into the system and get a detailed reply showing all their current shipments.

The testers’ lower-than-website-being-live volume of shipments have also meant that I’ve been able to properly debug the system and analyze better the information coming back from the shipping companies - this’ll make the whole thing a lot smoother when we go live.

In general the whole thing is holding up very well and has been very reliable.

The website is nearly finished and should be ready in mid-late January…After working on this for the last 2-3 months, I’m really looking forward to hearing what real users think about it.

Merry Christmas!

-Andrew

I decided this time around to use some professionals for the company’s logo and eventually picked ‘logoworks’. They did a good job I think and then I tweeked the design by hand to give the above. I think it nicely shows the movement of tracking and also one of the site’s main, more-fun, features (which will be revealed shortly).

TrackMyShipment’s 1st post! It’s the day after Thanksgiving and the servers have been very stable over the holidays. It’s really cool to work for a couple of months on software which now runs, handles users, sends reports and works well with me just keeping a careful eye on it.

Friends and Beta-Testers are liking the service and find it as useful as I hoped they would. All the back-end systems are nearly finished and Ross and I are working on the design of the web-based UI. Launch doesn’t feel too far off!