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The Google approach is much better. Tracking numbers go out in email to the customer and you can put little xml snippets in there so that gmail can put 'track o
by Theodores 9y ago
The Google approach is much better. Tracking numbers go out in email to the customer and you can put little xml snippets in there so that gmail can put 'track order' in the subject with a little button to click. This goes to the URL provided in the email, not to some magical service that magically determines if that tracking number came from UPS, USPS, Royal Mail, China Post, or whatever. Due to how couriers merge and get acquired you don't even have consistent tracking numbers for a given courier. So it is much better for the customer to not be guessing this stuff with Cortana.
Not everyone uses gmail. But, in the UK, for ecommerce, you can fully expect more than 50% of the order emails to be gmail addresses. Therefore the xml snippets approach is worth doing.
https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/ https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/
- QuercusMax 9y agoLooks like this isn't even a proprietary Google thing, they just have better support than lots of providers. The docs you point to mention that the schema is from schema.org.
- dingo_bat 9y agoThis is also present on outlook. I wonder why Cortana can't just use that same logic. I guess they had to justify their existence by coding up the same thing again.
- contextfree 9y agoCortana does use the same logic for automatically finding the tracking information, that has nothing to do with anything in the article though, which is about the UX for manually entering the tracking information.