With the explosion of internet-based retailing, nearly every company that ships packages and gets them to the customer's door has been doing well. They all have a way now to track a package that is being shipped to you, once you enter an online ticket. Many stores provide that ticket as a hyperlink, so you can easily determine when you'll receive something, once you receive a follow-up email from the company you ordered from.

This is all good, but isn't quite what they should do if they thought more about the customer. What I would want is just to enter my address, and have it tell me what packages were en-route to me. Why hasn't someone done this? Heck, why not take the next step and send me an email letting me know the shipment is on the way, when it will arrive, and give an option for me to have it delivered at an alternate location, if I'm not home? Seems like they'll eventually get there, but all such options would probably already be in use, if they thought of the problem from my perspective rather than theirs. Their customer, of course, is the store I bought from - but I'm the relevant stakeholder that is either thrilled by how they close the transaction, or frustrated, if I have to track down a package that's on hold... or when, like today, I couldn't really access, because I had an erroneous shipping number, and couldn't just enter my address to find out the status of a shipment!