What the WISMO? How To Keep Visibility Gaps From Scaring Customers Away

August 04, 2025

by Lori Boyer

Think you’ve got visibility? Think again. An estimated 8 billion packages a year move “blind” in the U.S.—no tracking, no updates, just guesswork.

And when customers don’t know where their package is? The WISMO floodgates open.

WISMO (short for “Where is my order?”) tickets surge, your support team drowns, and customer trust slips through your fingers. During peak season, the ripple effect is brutal—lost revenue, unnecessary reships, and brand damage you can’t afford.

The good news? Most of it is fixable.

In this blog series, we’re diving into four of the biggest visibility gaps hiding in your shipping workflow—and how to close them fast using tools you probably already have.

How To Keep Visibility Gaps From Scaring Customers Away
Fixing Phantom Shipments Fast (coming soon!)
Why Managing Exceptions Is Critical (coming soon!)
Eliminate Tracking Silos Before They Derail Peak (coming soon!)

Prefer to get all the information at once? Download the ebook here: How To Stop Visibility Gaps From Stealing Your Revenue.

To get started, let’s dive into the importance of shipping visibility and the first strategy for keeping track of every package: using webhooks.

Why are WISMO tickets so damaging?

WISMO tickets aren’t just annoying—they’re expensive, repetitive, and completely avoidable.

You’ve heard the messages a thousand times:

“Just checking on my order…”
“It’s been a few days—any updates?”
“Tracking hasn’t changed. What’s going on?”

Now multiply that by thousands of orders during peak season, and you have a serious CX crisis.

According to research, around 1 in 5 support tickets are WISMO-related—just customers asking where their order is. That’s 20% of your team’s time spent answering a question that could be handled automatically. During peak season, those numbers can jump to as high as 50%!

WISMO hits hard—and it adds up fast. It eats your support team alive, with agents stuck in a loop of repetitive tickets. It drains revenue, since every touchpoint costs time and often leads to unnecessary refunds or reships. It erodes trust, because if customers have to ask for updates, they assume you’re not in control. And the worst part? It’s completely preventable. You already have the data. You just need to use it.

But the most innovative CX teams aren’t just trying to reduce WISMO—they’re thinking bigger. They’ve realized the tracking experience is one of the most underutilized levers in eCommerce. These teams aren’t just answering “Where is my order?”—they’re turning tracking into a high-performing brand channel. They’re transforming status updates into personalized messages that drive upsells, build loyalty, and generate up to 9–12x ROI.

Who knew? That simple tracking message—via email, SMS, or push—could become one of your most valuable, brand-building moments. Smart sellers are already capitalizing—using it to upsell accessories, warranties, or connected items while the customer is still engaged.

Where is your visibility actually breaking?

Before you dive into automation, alerts, and dashboards, it’s worth zooming out to ask:

Where exactly is your visibility falling apart?

Start by mapping your customer’s post-purchase journey. Look at every step from label creation to delivery and ask, “Where do customers start getting nervous?” If they’re emailing you at the in_transit stage or calling once a shipment’s stuck in pre_transit, you’re not just missing updates—you’re missing opportunities to prevent frustration.

Next, look for the patterns. Are support tickets clustering around a certain status? Are “Where’s my order?” questions spiking after a specific handoff point (like when the carrier picks up)? Those high-friction moments are your visibility hotspots.

And finally, check your internal flow. If your ops and support teams are logging into multiple portals just to track one shipment, that’s a red flag. You need a system that pushes updates to where your team actually works—like Slack, Zendesk, or your WMS—not the other way around.

And don’t wait for peak season to fix this. Now is the time to:

Automate what you can. Every manual check you eliminate today is one less fire drill tomorrow.
Proactively message customers. Even if nothing’s changed, a quick “we’re still on it” message builds trust.
Watch your no-scan zones. Tools like Luma help you pinpoint carriers, routes, or regions where shipments tend to stall.
Learn from last year. Peak season left clues—use them. Where things got bottlenecked before is exactly where to build guardrails now.

When you take time to diagnose the real breakdowns in your post-purchase experience, the rest of the visibility playbook works even harder.

Automate visibility via webhooks

Here’s the hard truth: if a customer has to ask where their order is, you’ve already lost. Not the whole game—but definitely that round. The fix? Proactive updates. And the easiest way to make that happen without manually babysitting every package? Webhooks.

Let’s demystify the term real quick.

A webhook is basically a digital tripwire. The moment something changes with a shipment—like it goes from “in transit” to “out for delivery” or “delivery failed”—a webhook can automatically tell another system to do something about it. No polling, no checking, no guessing. Just: boom, update triggered.

How EasyPost solves WISMO

EasyPost makes it ridiculously easy to stay in the loop on every shipment. At the core of it all? webhook-powered tracking events.

Every time a shipment moves—or doesn’t—you get a real-time signal. Events like pre_transit, in_transit, out_for_delivery, delivered, exception, and delivery_failed are all available as webhooks, ready to trigger action the second something changes.

What kind of action? That’s up to you. Most brands use these events to automate updates that would otherwise eat up hours of team time. Think:

Branded emails to customers when packages are out for delivery
Slack alerts to ops when a delivery fails
Instant tickets in Gorgias or Zendesk when exceptions hit
Even refund or reship flows triggered without anyone lifting a finger

And it’s not just about generic automation—it’s about workflows that match your specific pain points. For example:

If a package hits out_for_delivery, send the customer a branded heads-up: “It’s on the truck!”
If the delivery fails, spin up a CX ticket with everything your support team needs to respond fast.
If a shipment’s been stuck in pre_transit limbo for more than 48 hours, ping your ops team to investigate—before the customer ever notices.

With EasyPost, these aren’t special features or paid add-ons. They’re built into the platform and ready to go the moment you start printing labels or tracking shipments. You just have to hook them into the systems you already use.

Follow along for more WISMO prevention strategies

This article is the first in a four-part series. We’ll link new articles above as they’re published so you can learn everything you need to know about filling visibility gaps and keeping customers happy. Make sure to follow along!

Talk with a shipping specialist to find more tools and resources.