Vextra Express: new site and SIGV, shipment management inside WordPress

About the client

Vextra Express is an international logistics company: it receives shipments from customers in Brazil and dispatches them worldwide through partner carriers such as DHL and FedEx, also handling export and import paperwork.

Operational and financial control lived in spreadsheets. End-customer tracking ran on an old Joomla portal, updated by hand: someone on the team checked each carrier’s website and typed the status into the portal.

The challenge

Every shipment meant repeated work in three places (spreadsheet, carrier, portal), and Vextra’s customer only knew where the package was when someone remembered to update it. As volume grew, the rework became a bottleneck and a source of errors.

The brief was a new website and, inside it, a system to centralise everything: shipments, customers, partners, automatic tracking, customer notifications and finance. No external software, and the team working in the same dashboard it already knew.

What we built

A new WordPress site and SIGV, Vextra’s Integrated Management System, developed as a custom plugin installed on the same WordPress.

• Shipments, customers and partners as native WordPress content types, with role-based permissions (admin, finance, operations) and quick search by code, invoice, customs declaration or recipient.
• Automatic tracking. A scheduler queries the carriers’ APIs (DHL, FedEx via OAuth, Correios and 17TRACK as a multi-carrier fallback), normalises statuses into a single timeline and translates events that arrive in English into Portuguese. It respects each API’s limits, with controlled pauses and retries.
• Customer notifications. Emails per stage (created, collected, in transit, delivered, exception) with templates editable in the dashboard, consolidated so the inbox is not flooded.
• Public tracking portal on the website itself, by code or secure token link, no login required.
• Finance per shipment: costs, invoicing, receivables, and SLA and status reports.
• Automatic plugin updates from GitHub releases, with automated tests on every version.

Results

Checking carriers and notifying customers stopped being manual tasks. The status that once depended on someone typing it into the portal now arrives on its own, and Vextra’s customers follow their shipment on the website at any time.

Spreadsheets and the Joomla portal are gone. Operations, finance and tracking live in a single database, with an auditable history of every event.

Since the first production version in February 2026, the system has had 35 releases in 7 months, all with a test suite, without stopping operations.