Melissa UK Team | Address Quality, Ecommerce, Express Entry, Location Intelligence, Mailing & Shipping, Postal Service

Faster and More Efficient Deliveries

Following the first part to this series Address Autocomplete for eCommerce: Better Conversion Rates, highlighting the aspects of a better UX experience for better conversion rates, we would now like to dive into the logistics element of this location intelligence solution, and the impacts it can have on a business.

First and foremost, businesses that do rely on logistics as part of everyday practice will quite commonly face the problem of failed deliveries. Reports state that this overhead can cost businesses up to an average of $230,000 with almost half of this figure being amounted to inaccurate address data.

Quite often, to keep customer satisfaction, 55% of retailers will refund the delivery charges back to the customer while 41% offer a discount voucher to make up for the error. In addition, 52% will have to cover the initial cost of re-delivery and not to mention potential damage to brand reputation.

With the above costs adding up, it makes a substantial impact on business performance, UK business retailers, in particular, paying an average price of £15 per failed delivery.

The way that an address lookup tool can avoid this problem is being able to give verified postal addresses at the point of entry. This guarantees that only valid postal addresses data is passed once it’s in the hands of the logistics service. Additionally, with clean address data, the tool will inevitably increase on-time delivery rates which we know is another issue foreseen in logistics.

So, what do we mean by on-time delivery? (OTD)

A metric that is measured based on the amount of orders being placed, to the amount of orders being delivered on time. OTD is measured in different ways depending on the organisation, per to say to entail the success rate between the two benchmarks in the given period and to identify any issues between orders placed and the initial delivery process.

This metric is especially viable to businesses starting to adapt to the trend of “future online delivery” being able to offer time slots within the day and even same-day delivery.

With the likes of Walmart and Argos following Amazon in this trend, the amounts of other eCommerce and logistics providers will soon need to respond to the expectations customers will have to this nature.

Trying to introduce such a trend will come with even more pressure, having to manage speedy deliveries to the right address, at the right time, the first time around. Costs of re-delivery and not meeting the expectation would account to more back draws, making location intelligence software increasingly important.

We can see that the price of delivery is a major factor in a retailer’s brand, but the attitudes and behaviour towards the improvements to logistics have surmounted this incentive. Customers are wanting more and more from their retailers; they need to be ready to keep up with their expectations. The right starting point is to implement the right tools.

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