Why I built Parcels
Parcels began as a personal project. In early 2017, I was ordering regularly from AliExpress and received several genuine tracking numbers that a popular tracking app did not recognize. The store itself showed incomplete information, or none at all, while other services asked me to select a carrier manually — even though I had no idea who was actually handling the parcel. In the end, all I could do was wait for a paper notice from the post office.
I had been looking for a project I genuinely wanted to build and maintain, so I decided to solve that problem. I wanted a service where I could enter the number provided by the store without having to understand tracking-number formats, logistics companies, or their delivery partners. That idea became the Parcels service and the Parcels mobile apps for iOS and Android.
I originally built Parcels for myself, and I still use it constantly whenever I order something. That is why the project is not shaped around an abstract idea of being an “aggregator.” It is shaped around a practical question: can I open the app and understand where my own parcel is now, and what has happened to it along the way?
One parcel does not always mean one carrier
An international parcel rarely completes its entire journey with a single company. It may first be handled by the store’s logistics partner, then by a line-haul carrier, and finally by a local postal operator or last-mile courier in the destination country. Each company sees only its part of the journey. Updates on the first carrier’s site may stop after a handoff, and the parcel may receive a new local tracking number.
Parcels therefore treats a shipment as one continuous journey, not as an isolated record on one carrier’s website. The service checks the number with relevant postal and courier companies, can track it with several carriers at once, discovers related and additional tracking numbers, and continues tracking through them. Events from different sources are combined into one timeline so that a carrier handoff does not look like the parcel has disappeared.
If a local delivery number is assigned during a handoff, the user should not have to find it inside a status message, copy it, and add it as a new parcel. Parcels links the numbers and shows the next leg in the context of the original shipment.
One number should be enough
The project’s central principle has not changed since 2017: require as little effort as possible from the person tracking a parcel. The user enters the number supplied by the store or sender. Identifying likely carriers, checking multiple sources, finding the next tracking number, and selecting the right services for the rest of the journey are the service’s job.
This automation is not based on one fixed list of number formats. Real logistics keeps changing: carriers hand parcels to partners, introduce new identifiers, redesign their websites, and describe the same events in different ways. Parcels uses known formats, route and destination information, relationships between delivery services, and successful tracking results to find the most complete and up-to-date picture. The system should adapt to the parcel’s real journey instead of requiring the user to understand the delivery network behind it.
A project I use myself
The first version of this page mentioned support for 187 transport, postal, and courier companies. Since then, the list of supported carriers and Parcels’ capabilities have grown considerably, while the goal has remained the same: remove the manual work between people and fragmented delivery systems, and show an order’s complete journey from its first acceptance to the last mile.
For me, Parcels is still a product, an engineering project, and the app I open after placing another order. Using it personally helps keep its philosophy simple: one parcel, one connected story, and as little work as possible for the user.
Send feedback, suggestions, or examples of shipments that Parcels could track better to hello@parcelsapp.com.
