Before you get started to use one of our product lines - tracking pages, notifications, analytics, parcel finder and/or comm center - please make sure you have initially set up your portal properly.
This article guides you through the first steps in our portal and can be used as a checklist during your onboarding process.
If you follow the listed steps listed below, you are ready to use the portal.
About Warehouses
Seven Senders Portal enables you to specify the locations of your warehouses. The provided data increases the accuracy of the Analytics metrics. With warehouse, users can add SLAs which allow to monitor carrier performance and estimated time of arrival. Users can set up SLA days, First hub scan timeout (hours), FDA timeout (days) and Delivery attempts (count) before return for each carrier, carrier country and warehouse. Seven Senders will estimate the carrier performance by calculating the number of metrics, for example: the lead time between FHS to FDA.
Adding a new Warehouse
In order to add a new warehouse,
- click on the Account button in the bottom-left corner
- then click Shop settings tab.
- Here, you will find Warehouses tab under Settings.
- Click on the 'ADD NEW' button in the top-right corner. Here, you'll find the list of your warehouses submitted for your shop.
- In order to add a new one, click at Add new button
- Assign a new Warehouse ID and select a Name
- Specify warehouse location details such as the Address, Postal Code, City and Country (visible on the map)
- In order to increase the accuracy of the Analytics, it’s advised to provide the system with the warehouse Working Hours as well as Working Days
- Choose to assign public or other Holidays to your warehouses (optional
- To complete the process, select one of the three icons at the bottom of the page (CREATE AND ADD ANOTHER or CREATE AND RETURN TO LIST or simply CREATE).
Important Note: Please make sure the warehouse ID equals the warehouse field on the API when creating a shipment.
Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
Service level agreements (SLAs) are the sets of parameters that define the contractual lead time on each route with a carrier. Each carrier on a route to a specific country can have different numbers of days needed for the last mile delivery. Based on the provided data, Seven Senders Portal calculates a various number of metrics that allow you to monitor the carrier performance or to show the estimated time of arrival on your tracking page.
Adding a new SLA
In order to create a new SLA record, click on the Account button in the bottom left corner. Then, click Shopping settings tab. Here, you will find SLAs tab under Settings. In order to add a new one, click at Add new button in the top right corner.
- Carrier Company : The carrier company's name
- Carrier Country: Country of the carrier company
- (i) shipping with Seven Senders via Colissimo from Germany to France: carrier country = France
- (ii) shipping directly with DHL Express Germany from Germany to France: country = Germany
- Delivery Country: Destination Country
- Service Level Agreement (days): Contractual number of days from first hub scan to first delivery attempt
- First Hub Scan Timeout (hours): Supposed number of hours between planned pick up and first hub scan. If exceeded, the FHS timeout event is triggered.
- FDA Timeout (days): Supposed number of days from first hub scan to first delivery attempt. If exceeded, the FDA timeout event is triggered.
- Warehouse: The warehouse from which the consignments are picked up by the carrier/ freight forwarder
- Number of delivery attempts before the carrier returns the shipment: The carrier initiates a postal return after the contractual amount of delivery attempts is exceeded
In order to submit your SLA, click Create.
Available Features
Measure the performance of your carrier on the last mile in Analytics on one of our predefined dashboards or create your own monitoring:
Monitor your linehaul performance and set-up an alerting by using our FHS timeout event - it warns you in case of any delays on the linehaul. 
An estimated time of arrival (ETA) can be displayed on the tracking page.
Moreover you can provide updates to consumer for non-trackable shipments via the Seven Senders Portal tracking page and/or notifications. Non-trackable shipments are shipments for which the carrier does not provide real-time tracking updates (e.g. forwarder for bulky goods or carrier handling letters). If shipments have been transferred as 'non-trackable' and SLAs are set-up for the referring carrier, we visualize the journey of the shipment.
About Shop Localisations
Localisations of your shop are defined by the domain (i.e.: https://yourshop.de/) and the language used (i.e. German). Each shop of yours can have multiple localisations.
This domain and language are to be provided to Seven Senders by the shop in the order information. See more about posting order information here.
If you are planning on adding several localisations this is a required step, since this will allow Seven Senders to map your shipments and orders to the correct localisation via the order URL and language. In case the URL and language are not transferred properly, the default set-up is shown in English.
All consumer-facing features of Seven Senders Portal use localisation-grouping (=combination of shop URL and language) in order to make sure that the right language will be used in communication with the consumer. For example, if the consumer made an order on the Polish domain of your shop, the e-mail notification he will get will be in Polish, same goes for the tracking page linked to that email and the dynamic content displayed on the latter.
Adding a Localisation
In order to add a new localisation, click on the Account button in the bottom-left corner, then click Shop settings tab. Now, find the Localisations setting group and click at Localisations. Here, you'll find the list of localisations set for your shop. In order to add a new one, click at Add localisation button in the top-right corner.
Now, you can define the new localisation of your shop by providing the right domain and the language.
Available Features
When setting up the localisation you can use the following features:
Important Note: If you want to use the features above the localisation you set-up need to match the Order URL and language pushed for the order via API.
After setting up these basics you are ready to deep dive into the functionalities of the 7S portal like: