Why send a link at all?
Because people ask. A customer who has paid for a delivery and is waiting in will check in, and without a link the only way to check is to call or message you. Each “where is it?” call costs your office a few minutes, interrupts a driver, and usually ends with an estimate that is wrong by the time the customer hangs up.
A live link changes who does the work. Instead of your team relaying a driver’s position, the customer looks for themselves, as often as they like, and sees exactly what your dispatcher sees, minus anything private.
What your customer sees
A private page for their delivery, which updates live while it is open:
- The driver on a map, moving towards them, with the route from the pickup to their address.
- An arrival time, worked out when the driver starts and updated if it moves by more than ten minutes.
- A feed of updates: “Your delivery is booked”, “Your parcel is on the way”, “Your driver has arrived”, “Delivered, received by …” or “We could not deliver”.
- Messages from you, such as a delay notice from your dispatcher or a quick note from the driver.
- The driver’s first name and, if you have added them, their photo and vehicle, so the customer knows who to expect.
- Proof of delivery once delivered, if you choose to show it.
What your customer does not see
The page uses a fixed allow-list of fields. It never shows phone numbers, email addresses, delivery or collection codes, internal notes or the driver’s route history. If you use delivery codes, the recipient sees theirs only after verifying their phone number. And once the delivery has been finished for seven days, the link stops working, so old links forwarded around cannot be used to watch your drivers.
How the link reaches your customer
Every delivery gets its link automatically. If the delivery has the customer’s email address, the link is emailed when the delivery is booked. For everything else, your dispatcher copies a ready-made message, worded from your own template, and pastes it into WhatsApp, a text message or your usual email. Track That Ride does not send texts or WhatsApp messages itself, so you use the channel your customers already reply to.
If you book deliveries from your own system through the API, the response includes the delivery’s public tracking token. The link is
https://trackthatride.com/track/ followed by that token, so you can put it in your own order confirmation emails.
Knowing the customer has seen it
When your customer opens the page, the updates on it are marked as seen. Your team can see “seen” or “not seen” against each update, which settles a surprising number of arguments: if a customer says they were never told about a delay, you can see whether they opened the page after it was posted. Those receipts also appear in the delivery’s audit trail.
Who uses tracking links?
Any courier whose customers wait in for a delivery: same-day and on-demand couriers, pharmacies delivering prescriptions, firms delivering to businesses that need someone at reception, and local shops running their own drivers. If your customers currently phone to ask “is it coming today?”, a tracking link is the single change most likely to stop those calls.