The Scenario
You are a customer service manager at an e-commerce brand. It is Tuesday morning and you have 80 customer emails sitting in your inbox, all asking where their package is. The tracking numbers are already in a Google Sheet: column A has the tracking number, column B has the carrier code. Columns C and D are empty.
Your team needs to know which packages are delivered, which are in transit, and which have exceptions before the morning standup at 10 AM.
The bad version of Tuesday morning:
- Copy tracking number one from column A
- Go to ShipEngine's dashboard or the carrier's tracking page
- Find the status
- Come back to the sheet, type it in column C
- Repeat 80 times
- Miss the standup.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads each row and calls ShipEngine's tracking API, so your team has a live status view before the meeting.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each row in my Tracking sheet, fetch the ShipEngine tracking info using the tracking number in column A and carrier code in column B, then write the current status and last event into columns C and D. If a package has an exception, also write the exception reason into column E.
SheetXAI reads the rows, calls the ShipEngine tracking endpoint for each one, and writes the current status, last event, and any exception details back into the sheet. Eighty rows done before the standup.
What You Get
Columns C, D, and E populated per row:
- Current status — "delivered," "in_transit," "exception," or "unknown"
- Last event — the most recent tracking scan, including location and timestamp
- Exception reason — only for rows with an exception status; blank otherwise
Your customer service team can sort column C to pull all exceptions to the top and work the problem cases first. No one has to manually check a tracking page again.
Want to add an estimated delivery date where ShipEngine returns one? Add "also write the estimated delivery date into column F" to the prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Tracking sheets pulled from shipping tools are not always consistent. SheetXAI handles the cleanup and the lookup in the same prompt.
When carrier codes are missing for some rows
The sheet has tracking numbers but the carrier column is blank for 20 rows because the export did not include it.
For rows in the Tracking sheet where column B is blank, ask ShipEngine to detect the carrier from the tracking number format. Then fetch tracking status and last event for all rows and write results into columns C and D.
When some tracking numbers are duplicated
The export ran twice and you have pairs of identical rows.
Deduplicate the Tracking sheet by the tracking number in column A, keeping the first occurrence of each. Then fetch ShipEngine tracking status and last event for all unique rows and write results into columns C and D.
When you only need to check packages that have not yet shown "delivered"
You ran this prompt yesterday and about half the rows are already showing delivered. No need to re-query those.
Skip any rows in the Tracking sheet where column C already contains 'delivered'. For all other rows, fetch the current ShipEngine tracking status and last event and update columns C and D.
When you need a summary report for the ops director in addition to the row-level detail
The director wants a one-paragraph summary, not a raw sheet.
Fetch ShipEngine tracking status and last event for every row in the Tracking sheet using the tracking number in column A and carrier code in column B. Write status and last event into columns C and D. Then write a summary paragraph into cell F1 showing how many packages are delivered, how many are in transit, and how many have exceptions, and list the exception tracking numbers in column F starting at row 3.
The pattern: the lookup and the summary happen in one prompt. You do not have to aggregate after the fact.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with a column of tracking numbers, then ask it to pull ShipEngine tracking status for each row. The ShipEngine integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export labels for billing reconciliation or the ShipEngine in Google Sheets overview.