The Importance of Address Verification

A lot of things can knock a package from its intended path.

As your support team already knows, the last thing a customer wants is an undelivered package, and the first thing they'll blame is your business.

Even if it's for a reason entirely out of your control, your support team has to perform some damage control, usually in the form of a discount or free product, which means even more money out of your pocket.

This is why it's important to increase deliverability in any way possible, and one of the biggest reasons for undelivered packages is bad shipping addresses. It can be because the customer completely misspelled their street name, or they put in the
the wrong format for their unit number or they got a couple of numbers wrong on their ZIP code.

So even if the customer's at fault for providing bad address information, it's still in your best interest to verify the customer's intended address. You could lose an average of $5 per shipment in wasted postage when you send out undeliverable and unverified packages.

Current address verification makes it possible to prevent shipments from going out with bad address data. Whether you do this at the checkout stage or the shipping stage, it's important to patch the shipment leakage associated with bad addresses.

In this whitepaper, we'll go over how address verification (AVS from here on out) should work for U.S. addresses, how it should work for international addresses and the overall benefits of applying it to your business operations.