Carriers
The carrier name in your tracking data is lying to you
A buyer sent me a screenshot: their AliExpress order said one carrier, the parcel showed up with a completely different one on the label.
Neither was wrong, exactly. The carrier field just doesn't mean what people think it means.
AliExpress parcels usually travel under one service to your country and then get handed to a local carrier for the last leg. The tracking data often keeps naming the line-haul service, or a generic aggregator like Cainiao, long after the parcel is actually in the hands of Evri, Yodel or Royal Mail. So the carrier name in the field is frequently the wrong carrier to hand your buyer.
Point a buyer at the wrong carrier's website and they get "no results found." Now they think the parcel is fake, and you've manufactured a case out of a naming quirk.
What to trust instead
The tracking number's own format is far more reliable than the carrier label attached to it. UK carrier numbers carry recognisable shapes and prefixes. The number tells you where to actually track - the carrier field is just a hint, and often a stale one.
Fetch Order Tracking leans on the number's format to point buyers at a tracking page that actually resolves, rather than blindly repeating whatever carrier name the API happened to return. The difference is a buyer who sees real scans versus a buyer who sees "not found" and panics.
The label on the box and the field in the data can disagree. When they do, the number wins.
Take one recent order and try tracking it on the carrier the field names. Does the number even resolve there?
For a fair few, it won't, and that's the buyer confusion you can head off.