While the patent is still pretty dumb, the claim is a bit more specific than this article summarizes. The claim seems carefully worded to exclude Amazon, UPS, and USPS shipping notifications, by limiting itself to "a broker computer system independent of the shipper and a merchant". UPS and the USPS are shippers of course, and Amazon is the merchant for the queries it brokers.

However, it seems like a real stretch for non-obviousness: they're trying to patent the idea of doing exactly what every shipping-status system does, only as a third party that simply queries those services, and then sends emails to the user when something changes.

Maybe it's a business-method patent rather than a technology patent. It's not even a patent on notification-system querying, because Amazon does that, only it does it for products it sold. It seems the only thing the claim is claiming as novel is the business idea of doing it as a third-party monitoring service.