WISMO in a small online store: measure it in 7 days, then cut it with 4 fixes

An email 2 days after checkout. A WhatsApp message on day 5 because tracking has not moved. A chat on day 9 that just says "???". That is WISMO, short for "where is my order?", and each one sends you to your store admin and the carrier's site to look up something the customer could have read in an email.

Many of these messages come from a gap you can close once, like a ship date nobody stated or a tracking link that leads nowhere. So count them for 7 days, sort them by reason and close the biggest gap first. Go by your own count, because the share everyone quotes has no source you can check.

The 30 to 50% figure has no traceable source

Search for WISMO and you will read that it makes up 30 to 50% of all support tickets. AfterShip, which sells tracking software and would gain from a big number, says figures in that range "circulate widely without a traceable, methodologically transparent source behind them" (AfterShip).

The popular 40% traces back to a Narvar blog post: "According to Forrester, nearly 40% of all customer service contacts during peak season are WISMO inquiries." Narvar links no Forrester study, and Macha, which went looking, could not find one. Even if the number holds, it describes peak season, not a normal month.

The two figures that at least name their data come from vendors, and they disagree:

• Gorgias, a help desk for online stores, says WISMO accounts for "18% of incoming requests on average, according to Gorgias data", without saying how many stores or which period (Gorgias).
• Yuma, which sells AI agents for ecommerce support, says WISMO drives "over 33% of volume", from its own platform data and again without a method (Yuma).

Each of these vendors sells a fix for WISMO. Read the numbers as what some stores see: roughly 1 in 6 to 1 in 3 messages, probably more in the holiday rush. A shop that ships the same day with a clear tracking email will likely sit below that range, and a dropshipping store with delivery times of 3 weeks above it. So count your own.

Measure your WISMO share in 7 days

Pick a normal week, not the one with your big sale. If your inbox keeps history, you can label last week today instead of waiting.

1. Create a label called WISMO and put it on every conversation that asks where an order is, when it arrives or why tracking has not moved. Include "delivered but not here" and address problems, since they often start with the same question. Leave out damaged or wrong items, which are a different problem. Count each conversation once, however many messages it has.
2. Add a second label for the reason, from the table below.
3. Write down how many orders you shipped in those 7 days.
4. Time 5 WISMO conversations: every reply you write in them, the lookup in your store and on the carrier's site included.
5. On day 8, work out 3 numbers: WISMO as a share of all conversations, WISMO conversations per 100 shipped orders, and the hours a week they take (WISMO conversations times your average minutes per conversation).

Any help desk with tags does the job, and so does a tally sheet next to the keyboard. In Deskwoot, labels and Reports come with every paid plan, and Reports breaks the last 7 days down by label.

Of the 3 numbers, watch the second. The share of all conversations jumps whenever something else gets louder, like a broken discount code. WISMO per 100 orders moves with how fast your parcels arrive and what your emails tell customers. Yuma's playbook calls it the WISMO query rate and the cleanest measure of whether you prevented contacts, because it "normalizes for growth and seasonality": twice the orders in December do not double it on their own. Slower carriers in December still push it up, so compare a week with a similar week.

The playbook also tracks customers who write again about the same order within 7 days: a second message means the first answer did not settle it. Give those a third label, such as "repeat".

We found no published WISMO rate per 100 orders with a clear method. The closest is total volume: Gorgias measured about 20 tickets per 100 orders for food and drink brands and about 46 for electronics brands (Gorgias Ecom Lab, vendor data from its own customers, reported for brands with about $10M in sales, March 2026). Apply Gorgias's 18% WISMO share to those totals and you land at roughly 4 to 8 WISMO per 100 orders. That mixes 2 data sets from brands much bigger than most small stores, so treat it as a rough check at most.

An example store, made up for illustration: 400 orders shipped, 120 conversations, 30 labeled WISMO. That is 25% of conversations and 7.5 WISMO per 100 orders. Reasons: 11 not shipped yet, 9 no tracking, 5 stuck or late, 3 delivered but not received, 2 address problems. At 4 minutes per conversation, those 30 take 2 hours a week, about 100 hours a year: more than 2 working weeks spent answering one question. Two thirds of the pile come from 2 gaps, so before any AI agent this store should say when orders ship and send a tracking link that works.

Fix 1: a shipping email with a tracking link that works

The "not shipped yet" and "no tracking" piles are the cheapest ones to empty.

• Say in the order confirmation when the order ships, in days. "Ships within 1 to 2 business days" answers what a "not shipped yet" message asks. Put the same promise on the product page and in the cart, so it is set before anyone pays.
• Send the shipping email when the parcel leaves, with the tracking number as a link. In Shopify, if your carrier is not fully supported or you choose "Other", enter the full tracking URL yourself (Shopify Help Center), or the customer may get a number with nowhere to put it.
• Shopify also sends "Out for delivery" and "Delivered" emails when your carrier or fulfillment app reports that event, unless someone switched them off under Settings > Notifications > Customer notifications. Check that they are on. Shopify notes that timing and accuracy vary by carrier (Shopify Help Center).
• WooCommerce needs an extension for tracking. Woo's own Shipment Tracking adds it to the Completed Order email and the order page in the customer's account, for $59 a year at the time of writing. If you buy your labels through WooCommerce Shipping, Woo says the tracking number lands in the Completed Order email without it.
• If your carrier shows something like "label created" before pickup, say in one sentence what that means and how long it usually lasts with you.

A shipping email that also tells the customer when to worry:

Your order [number] is on its way with [carrier]. Track it here: [tracking link]. It usually arrives within [2 to 3] business days, so by [date]. If tracking only says "label created" at first, that is normal: [carrier] usually scans the parcel within [1 business day] of pickup. If it has not arrived by [date plus 3 business days], reply to this email and we will sort it out.

Then test it like a customer: order to your own address with each carrier you use and open the link on your phone. A link that lands on a login page or an empty search box counts as no link.

Fix 2: a shipping page that answers the next question

Most shipping pages list prices and stop. The customer who writes to you wants to know if their order is late. Put this on the page:

• Your daily cutoff time and how many business days you need to pack.
• Typical delivery times per country or region, with the carrier you use there.
• When an order counts as late, with separate rules for home and abroad (for example 3 and 7 business days past the estimate), and what happens then.
• What "label created", "held at customs" and "delivered" mean, and what to do when a delivered parcel is not there.
• Until when the address can still be changed.

The late rule fits in a short paragraph:

Orders within [country] usually arrive in [2 to 4] business days, orders to other countries in [5 to 10]. If yours has not arrived 3 business days after that (7 for other countries), write to us with your order number. We will check with the carrier and, if the parcel is lost, send a replacement or a refund. If tracking says "delivered" and nothing is there, check your mailbox and ask your neighbors first, then write to us.

A written late rule tells customers when to start worrying, so fewer write on day 2 of a 5 day delivery. It also keeps your team from inventing a new answer each time.

In Deskwoot, add the page as a source in the Training Hub, and Fynn, the AI agent on the paid plans, answers shipping questions from it in the customer's language. Fynn reads your website again every 48 hours, so a new cutoff time reaches its answers without retraining. If the change cannot wait 2 days, click Re-crawl on the source. When the page does not cover a question, Fynn says so and offers a person instead of guessing.

Fix 3: let customers look up the order themselves

Some customers write anyway: they never saw the email, or they deleted it. Shopify already gives every order a status page, and after you add tracking, customers can come back to it and check the shipment without contacting you. Customers without an account may have to confirm their email address or phone number along with the order number (Shopify Help Center). The catch: they need the email link or a customer account to get there.

In a chat, the cleanest lookup asks for two things the customer knows, the order number and the postal code. That is enough to share the status without a login, and a stranger who only guesses an order number gets nothing.

That is how Fynn handles order questions for online stores. Connect Shopify or WooCommerce and turn on order access and tracking links in the bot settings. When a customer writes "where is my order??", Fynn asks for the order number and the shipping postal code in one reply, checks them against your store and answers with the status and, once the parcel is on its way, the carrier and the tracking link. It also finds orders Deskwoot has not stored yet, such as ones placed before you connected the store. After 3 wrong tries in one conversation, the lookup pauses for 15 minutes, so nobody can guess their way through postal codes. Anything more personal, such as payment details, waits until the customer clicks a confirmation link Fynn emails them, valid for 15 minutes.

The Shopify integration works on every plan, the free Hacker plan included, and your first store costs nothing extra. Fynn needs a paid plan, from $4 per agent a month on Startup (all plans). Startup includes 50 AI conversations a month for the whole workspace, and each one after that costs $0.07 from a prepaid balance. If Fynn took all 30 WISMO conversations a week of the example store, about 130 a month, the 80 extra would add $5.60. With 1 agent, that is $9.60 a month for the 2 hours a week those conversations took by hand. With WooCommerce, Fynn sees the order status either way but shares tracking links only with the Shipment Tracking extension, even if WooCommerce Shipping already puts the number in your emails.

Fix 4: watch the carrier's status and write first

Your store knows the order shipped. What happens next lives with the carrier, and a parcel that sits in a depot for 4 days turns into a WISMO message on day 5. Set a threshold for "stalled" per route, early enough to beat that message. Yuma's playbook gives an example for domestic orders: a parcel counts as on time while it is under 7 business days since shipment and under 5 days since the last scan, and thresholds abroad differ (Yuma). If your customers write sooner than that, go lower. Your "stuck or late" conversations show when they start: note on each one how many days had passed since the last scan.

Once a parcel crosses your threshold, open an inquiry with the carrier and send the customer the "stuck in transit" note from the templates below before they ask. Without a tool that watches every shipment, do it by hand 2 or 3 times a week: take the orders that shipped more than [your threshold] ago and have no delivery scan yet, and open each tracking link.

The slow part of every "stuck or late" message is the trip to the carrier's site. On Deskwoot's Business and Enterprise plans, Ship24 brings the carrier's status into the inbox. It covers over 1,500 carriers, among them DHL, Deutsche Post, Hermes, DPD, GLS, UPS, Royal Mail and Correios, and you need neither a Ship24 nor a carrier account. When a customer who confirmed their email address asks about their parcel, Fynn fetches the carrier's current status for their newest shipped order and answers with it instead of the store's last fulfillment update. An order linked to a conversation gets the status within a few hours, and Deskwoot keeps it current next to the conversation until delivery. It does not watch every order you ship, only the ones that come up in a conversation, so the check for stalled parcels stays with you or your shipping tool. Business costs $8 per agent a month, or $6.40 billed yearly.

That matters most when your count shows a lot of "stuck or late". If most of yours is "not shipped yet", start with fixes 1 and 2.

Reply templates for the 4 hard cases

Some messages need a person. Write these replies once, agree what your team may offer, and save them as canned responses. In Deskwoot (Startup and up) they take 13 placeholders with a fallback: "{{ contact.first_name | there }}" becomes the customer's first name, or "there", so it can stand where these say [first name]. Fill in the other brackets by hand.

Late

Hi [first name], thanks for checking in. Your order [number] left us on [date] with [carrier] and is [X] days past the date we gave you. I have asked [carrier] to look into it and will write again by [day], with or without news. If you would rather not wait, I can [send a replacement / refund the order] today. Just say which.

Stuck in transit

Hi [first name], I checked order [number]. The last scan from [carrier] was on [date] in [place], and nothing has moved since. I opened an inquiry with [carrier] today. If there is no new scan by [date], I will [send a replacement / refund you] without you asking again.

To send it before the customer asks, start with "Hi [first name], a quick update on order [number]." and keep the rest.

Tracking says delivered, but it is not there

Hi [first name], sorry, that is frustrating. [Carrier] marked order [number] as delivered on [date] at [time][, left at: place]. Could you check around your door, your mailbox and with your neighbors, and let me know by [tomorrow]? I have also asked [carrier] for proof of delivery. If the parcel has not turned up, I will open a claim with [carrier] and [send a replacement / refund you]. You will not need to do anything else.

Decide in advance when you replace right away and when you first wait for the carrier's proof of delivery, for example: below [$40] order value, replace at once; above it, wait for the proof. Selling in the EU or the UK? There the parcel stays at your risk until the customer has it (see the rules below), so the carrier's answer to your claim does not decide what the customer gets. That depends on whether the parcel reached them.

Wrong address

Hi [first name], thanks for telling me so quickly. [Not shipped yet:] I changed the address on order [number] to [new address]. [Already shipped:] The parcel is already with [carrier], and I have asked them to redirect it to [new address]. If they cannot, it comes back to us and I will send it again [at our cost / for X].

Rules for late and lost parcels

The details depend on the country. EU countries build their rules on the same directive, the UK has its own act, and the US has a federal rule.

• EU, delivery: unless you agreed on another time, you must deliver without undue delay and at the latest 30 days after the contract. If you miss the date, the customer can give you an additional period that fits the circumstances and terminate the contract if you miss that too (Directive 2011/83/EU, Article 18).
• EU, risk: when the store sends the goods, the risk of loss passes to the customer only once they, or someone they named other than the carrier, physically have them (Article 20). The exception is a carrier the customer hired themselves and you did not offer. A "delivered" scan is not the same as the parcel in the customer's hands.
• UK: unless you agreed on a time, you must deliver without undue delay and within 30 days after the contract (Consumer Rights Act 2015, section 28). The goods stay at your risk until the customer, or a person they named, physically has them, unless the customer commissioned a carrier you did not offer (section 29).
• US: under the FTC's Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule, you need a reasonable basis for the shipping time you state, or for 30 days if you state none. If you cannot ship on time, offer the choice between accepting the delay and cancelling for a prompt refund (FTC business guide).

This is general information, not legal advice.

Count again in 4 weeks

A month after your changes, run the same 7 days with the same labels. If WISMO per 100 orders dropped and the "no tracking" pile is nearly empty, your emails work. Whatever is left tells you which fix comes next.

If "where is my order?" is still your biggest pile after that, test Fynn on your own orders before you pay for anything. Start a Deskwoot workspace and you get 7 days of the Enterprise plan, no card needed. Connect your Shopify or WooCommerce store, turn on order access and tracking links in the bot settings and ask Fynn about an order you shipped this week, the way a customer would. When the 7 days end, you pick a paid plan or keep working on the free Hacker plan, without Fynn.