Delivery fleet tracking puts the van on your customer's phone
Already running Yipii in Malta and Gozo
Where the last leg costs you
Four things come up in nearly every conversation we have with a delivery operator in Malta.
"Where is my delivery?" from 14:00 onwards
Somebody in the office spends the afternoon on the phone giving customers an answer they already half know. The driver gets rung too, which is how a 12-drop round turns into an 11-drop round.
Nobody in when the van gets there
The customer stepped out because they had no idea the van was five minutes away. The parcel comes back to the depot and you pay for the same drop twice.
A drop you cannot prove you made
A customer in Sliema says nothing arrived on Tuesday. Your driver says it did. Without a timestamp against that address, you write off the goods to keep the account.
Driving you never see
Drivers behind on a round make it up on the road, and the first you hear about it is a phone call from a member of the public or a claim from an insurer.
A multi-drop morning, from the yard to the dispute
Your times will differ. The sequence, and the features behind each step, will not.
- 107:20
Loading in Qormi
Dispatch creates a link for each of the morning's customers, either by hand in the dashboard or from your order system through the API. Each link carries an access mode: public for a household drop, email plus a 6-digit code for a pharmacy, an approval queue for a government site.
- 208:05
First drop, Valletta
The customer opened the link by SMS. They see the van moving on a map. They do not see the driver, the other 11 drops, your alerts, the tracker IMEI or your account name, because every internal identifier is stripped before the position goes out.
- 309:10
Second drop, Sliema
This link was set to expire on arrival: a 100 m radius around the delivery address and 5 minutes parked inside it. The van pulls up, waits, and the page swaps the map for a delivery-complete message. An expired link never quietly keeps broadcasting.
- 410:35
Regular account, Birkirkara
This customer takes a drop most days, so their yard has a geofence around it. The crossing lands in the reports as an arrival and a departure with times against them, without the driver doing anything.
- 511:50
A same-day job comes in
Dispatch looks at the live map, finds the nearest van to the pick-up, and sends that one instead of running a vehicle out from the depot.
- 6The following Tuesday
The disputed drop
The customer queries the delivery from last week. You pull the trip report and the route playback for that van, export it to PDF, and send the times the van arrived and left their address. The access log also shows the link was opened, and when.
What you pay depends on how many vehicles you run and what you fit to them. Tell our Malta team both and we will quote it.
Ask for a quoteWhat delivery fleet tracking in Malta runs on
All of it sits on one account and one map, so the last leg is not a second system for dispatch to keep open.
- GeofencingA zone around every regular customer site, so arrivals and departures reach the reports with times against them.Yipii IoT
- ReportingTrip reports and route playback, up to 31 days at a time, out to PDF, Excel, JSON or HTML.Yipii IoT
- AlertsSpeed thresholds and the three geofence conditions, free by email, or 1 to 3 credits a message on SMS and WhatsApp.Yipii IoT
- Driver ScoringBraking, acceleration, cornering and speed as one score out of 100, with each harsh event pinned to the map.Yipii IoT
Geofencing, reporting, the live map, alerts and driver scoring are part of Yipii IoT, the core tracking account. Every account gets three active sharing links, and above that the sharing add-on is quoted in with the rest. It bills by the assets shared rather than the links created, so four links covering 10 vans bills 10 vans, and a link per order still bills per van. Nothing on this page needs the Yipii Mobility add-on.
Hardwired in the van, or the courier's own phone
Owned vans get a hardwired Teltonika unit, FMB120 or FMC130 class, fitted behind the dash and wired to permanent power so a driver cannot unplug it. Couriers on their own vehicles get Yipii Driver instead, which turns the phone in their pocket into the tracker with nothing fitted at all. One honest limit on that: it reports while the app is running and the phone has charge, so it suits a subcontracted courier better than a refrigerated van. A delivery vehicle gets tracked one of those two ways with us, wired into the van or through the phone in the driver's pocket.
- Hardwired install behind the dash, not a plug-in dongle
- Teltonika FMB120 and FMC130 class units, configured and tested before delivery
- A Yipii multi-network SIM that switches between GO, Melita and Epic
- Yipii Driver puts a courier on the map with no install in the vehicle
The sums, with every assumption showing
The arithmetic below runs on a 12-van round, at 250 working days a year. Your own round will look different, and so will every figure in the table.
What the four rows below come to on a 12-van round, at 250 working days a year.
Your round is not our round. Change the ten calls and watch it move.
| Lever | Assumption | Over a year |
|---|---|---|
| The "where is my delivery" calls | 10 calls a day at 3 minutes each answered by a link instead of a person, over 250 working days, office time at €14 an hour | €1,750 |
| Redeliveries avoided | 2 failed drops a month not repeated, at €18 to run each one again | €432 |
| Disputes settled on the timestamps | 1 a month resolved on the record rather than written off, at €60 of goods or credit | €720 |
| Idling cut across the vans | 15 minutes a day less idling across 12 vans, at 2.5 litres an hour and €1.55 a litre, over 250 working days | €2,906 |
Everything rests on 250 working days a year, so a six-day operation moves rows one and four upwards. The idling row is published at €2,906 rather than the €6,400 our own docs carried, because €6,400 needs about 550 working days to be true and nobody works those. Illustrative arithmetic, not a measured customer outcome.
Frequently asked
The live position of the van on a map, and that is the whole of it. There is no arrival estimate, no speed, no driver name, no other drop on the round, and no history. The tracker IMEI, your account details and every internal identifier are stripped before the position is broadcast, so the page gives away nothing about how you run. It opens in any browser on any device with nothing to install. You choose the friction when you create the link: public, an email address typed and logged, an email plus a fixed 6-digit code you hand out yourself, or an approval queue where we email a one-time code that is valid for 15 minutes.
You pick how it ends when you create it. A link can run forever, stop at a fixed date and time, stop a set number of hours after you created it, stop a set number of hours after the customer first opened it, or expire on arrival. On-arrival expiry is the one most delivery operators want: you set a radius around the destination, anywhere from 50 m to 5,000 m with 100 m as the default, and how long the van has to sit inside it, from 0 to 60 minutes with 5 as the default. Once that is met the page shows a closing message instead of a map. An expired link never silently keeps broadcasting, which is the part that matters when the same customer forwards it to somebody else.
For the question that usually gets asked, yes. A geofence around the customer's address turns every crossing into an arrival and a departure with a time and a GPS position behind it, and that record exports to PDF or Excel alongside the route playback for the whole round. What it proves is that your van was at that address at that time. It does not prove who took the parcel, because Yipii IoT has no signature capture or photo capture in it. Most operators find the timestamp settles the argument on its own, and we would rather say that plainly than call it proof of delivery.
Fewer than you think. Every account includes three active links at no cost. Above that, the sharing add-on bills by the number of unique assets you share, not the number of links you create, so four links covering 10 vans bills 10 vans. That is the part worth understanding for last-mile work: if you generate a fresh link for every order, you are still billed against the van it points at, not against the order count. A 12-van operation is a 12-van quote whether it sends 20 links a day or 200.
It depends on the number of vans, whether they are hardwired or running Yipii Driver, how many customer sites you want fenced, and whether you want SMS or WhatsApp alerts on top of the free email ones. We price each fleet on what it actually needs instead of putting a list on the website, because a three-van courier and a 30-van distributor buy very different amounts of it. Tell us the fleet size and how you dispatch, and we will come back with a figure and an install date.
A delivery fleet usually asks about two more jobs once the links are running: Driver ID & auto-assignment and Theft recovery & unauthorised movement.
The link setup, the access modes and the API call that creates a link from your order system are written out in the last-mile delivery guide in the Yipii IoT docs.