Track-Trace and the old free lookup sites: what you give up

These sites have been around for twenty years and they still get traffic, which tells you they solve something. They solve exactly one thing.

How they work

You paste a container number, the site identifies the carrier from the prefix, and it sends you to that carrier's tracking page. Useful, quick, free, and it saves you remembering forty different URLs.

Where they stop

Everything after the lookup. No stored history, so tomorrow you start again. No alerts, so you have to remember to check. No consolidated view, so forty containers means forty separate visits to five different carrier sites, each with its own layout and vocabulary.

And no defence against wrong data. Whatever the carrier page says is what you get, including the days when it says something that is not true.

What changes with a real tool

Your active shipments on one screen with one vocabulary. Alerts on the milestones that matter to the person who needs them. History that survives. And somebody checking the conflicts before they reach you.

If you track two containers a month, the free sites are the right answer and we would say so. Past about twenty, the arithmetic stops being close.