Failed order visibility
Why Failed Order Visibility Matters
When a mail piece fails to produce, time is critical. A missed fix window can delay an entire campaign or cause the same failure to repeat. It’s our goal to notify you when and why a mail piece fails to get produced so that you can quickly act to resolve the issue and re-send the mail.
Why Mail Pieces Fail
Mail pieces fail either due to an issue with your creative not matching print specifications or to an issue with your audience file not meeting USPS deliverability requirements. Our product will give you a failure reason so that you know what happened and how to resolve it. For more detailed troubleshooting on why your creative might not be print-ready, view Creative Errors.
5 Ways to Find Failed Orders
Failed Order Visibility introduces five surfaces that help you find and understand failure data without opening a support ticket.
1. Failed Mail Pieces Homepage
The Failed Mail Pieces page is your single destination for all failed mail pieces, regardless of whether the root cause is a creative issue or an audience issue.
Under the “Print & Mail” section in the Lob dashboard, you’ll find a tab called “Failed Mail Pieces”
Every failed piece displays a failure reason that explains the root cause and how to resolve it.
Export the full list of failures as a CSV for further analysis or sharing with your team.
2. Campaign Failures View
Need to drill into a specific campaign? The Campaign Failures view lets you see all failures scoped to that campaign, again covering both creative and audience failure types in one place.
When viewing a campaign detail page in the Lob dashboard, you’ll see the success and failure rate for that campaign.
You can click into the Failed data point to see the detailed report of all failures
Each failed piece includes a failure reason with root cause details and resolution steps.
Export campaign-level failure data for reporting or follow-up.
3. Email Notifications
Rather than checking the dashboard manually, you can opt in to proactive email alerts that notify you when mail fails due to a creative not being print-ready.
In the “Settings” tab in the Lob dashboard, you can opt in to the “Failed Mail Pieces Emails”
Choose your preferred alert cadence: twice daily, daily, or weekly.
Select which team member(s) should receive the notifications.
⚠️ Email alerts are currently limited to creative failures only. The Failed Mail Piece Homepage and Campaign Failures View capture both creative and audience failures, but email notifications will not alert you to audience-related failures. Check the Failed Mail Pieces page regularly to catch audience failures that won’t trigger an email.
4. Webhooks
If you prefer to be notified via a webhook when mail fails due to a creative not being print-ready, you can create a webhook in the Lob dashboard (learn more about using webhooks here).
Under Webhooks in the dashboard, in the Live environment, click Create.
Check “[formfactor].failed”; click Create.
⚠️ Webhooks are currently limited to creative failures only. The Failed Mail Piece Homepage and Campaign Failures View capture both creative and audience failures, but webhooks will not alert you to audience-related failures. Check the Failed Mail Pieces page regularly to catch audience failures that won’t trigger an email.
5. API response
For customers who are sending mail via API, you can look at the API response for failures.
Some audience failures are detected during the original API request and are returned as API errors. Other failures, such as creative failures, may happen after the request has been accepted. In those cases, the mailpiece status is updated to
failed, and failure details are available on the resource infailure_reason.You will either have to poll the API for the status change, or you can instead rely on the failed events to be returned via webhook or the Lob dashboard.
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