What the WISMO? Fixing Phantom Shipments Fast

WISMO (short for “Where is my order”) tickets take up your team’s bandwidth and lose your company money. In our blog series, we’re covering four strategies that top brands use to avoid WISMO fiascos. Find the other articles here:

1. How To Keep Visibility Gaps From Scaring Customers Away
2. Fixing Phantom Shipments Fast 
3. Why Managing Exceptions Is Critical (coming soon!)
4. 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.

What’s a phantom shipment?

Phantom shipments are the ghost stories of ecommerce—packages that technically exist, but never actually leave the building. And during peak? They come out in full force.

Here’s how it usually plays out:  A label gets printed. Everyone assumes the package is on its way. But days later, the tracking still says “pre-transit.” No scans. No updates. No clue where it is.

Maybe it’s buried in a bin in your warehouse. Maybe your 3PL forgot to hand it off. Maybe the carrier picked it up but didn’t scan it. Either way, your system thinks the job is done—and your customer is getting more anxious by the hour.

While there’s no official stat tracking phantom shipments, seller forums (especially places like Etsy) are full of complaints about orders stuck in “label created” limbo. And it’s not just a small-shop problem. When labels are batch-printed in the thousands, even a 2–3% slip-through rate can mean hundreds of customer service disasters in the making.

And the kicker? Most brands don’t even know it’s happening. If you’re only watching for issues after the first scan, you’re already too late.

What makes phantom shipments so damaging?

They quietly wreck the customer experience. Orders appear to vanish into thin air, and the trust your brand worked so hard to build starts to unravel.

Customers panic. Support gets slammed. Refunds and reships start flying. Margins shrink. And your team burns hours trying to figure out what went wrong—all while flying blind.

How to spot (and stop) a phantom shipment

The solution is simple but powerful: monitor the gap between label creation and first carrier scan. With EasyPost, you can track every shipment’s status in real time. If a package is still sitting in pre_transit 24 hours after the label was printed, that’s a red flag—and it’s time to act.

You can set up webhook alerts to automatically flag these stuck shipments and notify your ops team via Slack, email, or your WMS. It’s like a motion sensor for your fulfillment floor—if something hasn’t moved, you’ll know about it.

Some teams also use Luma Insights or EasyPost Analytics to track pre-transit dwell time across carriers, SKUs, or warehouse zones, shining a light on patterns that cause delays. Think of it as a visibility audit—one that tells you exactly where your process is breaking down.

When you catch one: what to do next

Once your alert fires and a shipment’s been stuck for more than 24 hours, it’s go-time. Start by checking with your warehouse or 3PL—sometimes the package never actually left, and internal statuses like “packed but not shipped” can confirm whether it’s missing or just stalled. 

Next, look for scan failures. Carriers like USPS often do bulk pickups without scanning each package individually, so if that’s a known quirk in your process, you may want to introduce in-house scans before handoff to create a reliable timestamp. 

Then, cross-check the tracking record. If nothing shows up beyond “label created,” it may be time to void and re-ship—but don’t hit the panic button until you’ve confirmed the original didn’t move. And through it all, don’t leave your customer in the dark. A quick, proactive message like “We’re looking into this” can go a long way to easing concerns and protecting trust.

How to prevent phantom shipments for good

Want to keep ghosts out of your warehouse? Here’s how smart teams shut this down before it starts:

• Don’t print the label too early. Make sure the label isn’t generated until the package is packed and ready to go. If you batch-print, add a final scan or bin-check step before the pickup window.
• Track dwell time as a KPI. Monitor how long packages sit in pre_transit, and flag anything that lingers too long. Use that data to identify consistent trouble spots.
• Auto-cancel unused labels. Set a rule: if a shipment hasn’t moved in 72 hours, void the label and notify your team.
• Scan before the handoff. If your carrier doesn’t provide reliable scans at pickup, create your own scan step in-house. That scan is your proof the package actually left the building—and your insurance against guesswork.

Catching a phantom shipment quickly is critical—but preventing them altogether is even better. When you tie label creation to fulfillment readiness, build in a last-mile scan, and watch for silent delays, you give your team the power to fix problems before customers even notice.

Because “label created” should never be the last word in a shipment’s journey.