Solving the shipping blind spot with the Samsara Tracking Label

The Tracking Label, shipped last month at our annual Beyond conference, is a Bluetooth sticker that can be applied to any shipment (a pallet, a package, a piece of cargo) with no cellular or GPS dependency and a 45-day battery life after activation. It relies on the Samsara network to catch its signal wherever shipments move: airports, warehouses, roads. The network is what makes this sticker more useful for shipment tracking than any other solution today.

In this episode of Object Stats, VP of Product & Engineering David Gal and Staff Software Engineer Hannes Magnusson join the podcast to walk through how the Tracking Label went from a hand-assembled office prototype to tracking 100% Samsara's own shipments in the field — and why customers are now clamoring to use it for their own shipments.

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Here's what we learned:

1. The infrastructure that makes this possible

The Samsara network spans airports, warehouses, and along highways, the same routes most freight takes. Consumer Bluetooth networks don't. That coverage is what makes a simple Bluetooth sticker viable for shipment tracking in the first place.

The Tracking Label is designed to be thin, disposable, and used once, which means a smaller battery and lower transmit power. Before committing to that design, the team had one question to answer: would the Samsara network be dense enough to pick up the Tracking Label's signal anyway?

To find out, they assembled 500 prototype units in the office and quietly applied them to real outgoing shipments, and it worked. The network is dense enough to detect when a shipment with a Tracking Label moves from a truck to a rail car to a flight, with alerting built around each handoff.

2. We became our own first customer

Samsara ships hundreds of thousands of packages a year, which made the internal ops team a natural first customer, aka “Samsara on Samsara.” Working with our third-party logistics partner, the team started applying labels to 10% of outgoing shipments, then 30%, eventually reaching 100%. They visited the warehouse multiple times to understand how labels would be applied at volume, what the workflow friction looked like, and how to integrate with the systems already running the operation.

When our logistics partners saw real-time location data on their own outgoing shipments, they wanted in immediately. That direct feedback loop shaped a lot of what the product became.

3. Finding the signal in hundreds of thousands of shipments

The first version of the dashboard listed every shipment, and nobody looked at it.

When shipments are on track a wall of status updates isn’t really helpful. The real engineering challenge was figuring out what deserved attention at scale and building a system that could surface only that.

Shipment Center ended up being built around exceptions: stalled shipments, failed deliveries, packages that ended up at the wrong address. 

The team also merged several data sources, carrier events, and Samsara's own observations into one system that could differentiate between a shipment that failed to deliver and one that was physically damaged in transit. At hundreds of thousands of shipments moving at any given time, getting that signal-to-noise ratio right is what makes the product useful.

Just two engineers built the Tracking Label and shipped it (no pun intended). That pace is only possible because of what we’ve already built: a network deployed across millions of vehicles, a customer base that gives direct access to the problems worth solving, and a culture that enables you to go build.

The launch at Beyond 2026 captured that spirit pretty well. Hannes emerged from a box of Kit Kats on stage to demo the product live in front of thousands of customers. Not your typical engineering launch.

Come build with us.