An AliExpress parcel rarely stays with one company. A typical order passes through four or five, and each handoff is a point where tracking can go quiet. Here is the whole route.

Stage 1: Seller to first carrier (days 1 to 4)

The seller packs your item and hands it to a carrier. Your first scan reads something like "Shipment picked up" or "Order accepted by carrier". Nothing before this point is trackable, which is why a freshly issued number returns nothing.

Stage 2: Domestic sorting in China (days 2 to 7)

The parcel moves through a local depot to a regional hub — usually Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Yiwu or Shanghai. Parcels heading to the same country are grouped together here, which is why cheap shipping sometimes appears to sit still: it is waiting for a full container.

Stage 3: Export and flight (days 5 to 20)

You see "Departed from airport of origin" or "Handed over to airline", and then quite often nothing at all for a week or two. There are no scanners in the air. This silence is normal and it is the single most common reason people conclude a parcel is lost when it is not.

Stage 4: Arrival and customs (days 10 to 30)

"Arrived at destination country" and "Inbound into customs" mean the parcel is in your country. Customs works in batches, so this is queue time rather than inspection time. During Chinese New Year or the November sale peak, the backlog alone can add two weeks.

Stage 5: Local delivery (1 to 5 days after clearance)

Your national carrier takes over — USPS, Royal Mail, Correos, Canada Post, Pakistan Post. Scans become frequent and specific again: arrived at local facility, out for delivery, delivered.

Why tracking breaks at the handoff

The AliExpress app shows you the Cainiao view of the journey. Your national carrier shows you its own view, and usually only once the parcel is already in the country. In between sits a gap where neither system says much, and where the parcel often picks up a second, local tracking number.

That gap is the whole reason this site exists. Our tracking tool queries both sides and stitches them into one timeline, so a parcel that has been handed to USPS still shows up under the original Cainiao number.

Reading the timeline sensibly

Judge progress by the date of the most recent scan, not by the number of scans. Ten events in China and then silence is a parcel in the air, not a parcel in trouble. And do not read anything into events that repeat or appear out of order — consolidation and re-sorting produce both, routinely.

If the silence is genuinely running long for your shipping tier, our guide on tracking that is not updating has the day counts at which it becomes worth acting.