Patent ID: 8311952

Claim:
A method of providing notification of impending delivery of a shipment shipped by a shipper to a shipping address specified by a customer, the method comprising: periodically querying, by a computer system, a shipper system to obtain status information for the shipment with each query; responsive to status information obtained with a periodic query indicating an estimated delivery date for the shipment, halting, by the computer system, the periodic queries and scheduling a restart time for periodic queries of the shipper system responsive to the estimated delivery date; restarting, by the computer system, the periodic queries of the shipper system at the scheduled restart time to obtain updated status information with each restarted periodic query; calculating, by the computer system, an estimated delivery time for the shipment based at least in part on updated status information obtained with a restated periodic query; and transmitting, by the computer system, the estimated delivery time to a customer device.