Tracking
The most dangerous parcel is the one with no first scan
A supplier gave one of my orders a tracking number the same afternoon I placed it. Fast, right? I marked it shipped and moved on.
Nine days later the buyer messaged. The tracking number had never been scanned once. The parcel existed on paper and nowhere else.
This is the quietest failure in dropshipping. A tracking number is not a moving parcel. AliExpress suppliers generate the number when they book the shipment, not when the carrier physically takes it. The gap between "number issued" and "first scan" is where parcels disappear.
Everyone watches for a Delivered status. Almost nobody watches for the absence of a first scan. But a number that is three, four, five days old with zero carrier events is a far earlier warning than anything eBay will ever show you.
Why it slips past you
Because it looks handled. The row has a tracking number in it. Your eyes read "has number = done" and skip on. Nothing is red. Nothing is missing. The one thing wrong is a date you'd have to do arithmetic on: today minus the ship date, against a scan count of zero.
When I built Fetch Order Tracking, this became one of the checks I lean on most. It doesn't just copy the AliExpress status into your sheet — it watches the age of the tracking number against whether the carrier has actually acknowledged the parcel. A number with no movement past a threshold gets flagged before the estimated delivery date is anywhere close.
That flag buys you the one thing that matters here: time to message the supplier and re-ship before your buyer is the one telling you something's wrong.
Go pull your last 20 shipped orders and check one column: how many have a tracking number older than four days with no first scan?
I'd bet at least one is sitting still.