Just Ship It!

Delivery Is Easy & Other Shipping Myths

Delivery is an easy problem. At least that’s what friends have told me since my earliest days working on delivery solutions at Amazon and more recently at MileZero. Generally, the next thing I hear is why: “it’s simply a matter of taking packages from a warehouse to the customer”. Ah…. If it were that easy UPS wouldn’t generate $46.5 billion in revenue and everyone would offer a low-cost, relatively fast shipping service like Amazon Prime.

So what makes it difficult and how can e-commerce companies that depend on successful delivery 'make it easy’ (or at least more effective)? Here are a few tips…

Know Thy Customer

Availability & Preferences: When will your customer be home? This is vital information for numerous use cases: signature required (i.e. expensive items and adult items including video games in some countries), refrigerated and white glove delivery, and getting access to complexes with entry codes to make deliveries. Understanding a customer's preferences for dealing with exceptions or obtaining special instructions is becoming increasingly important to ensure first time delivery success.

Tip: It's important to collect rich information at address creation. This may be your only opportunity to interact with customer before shipping an order. However, balance the data you collect against what your carriers can actually do. The best solutions make gathering additional data feel natural. For example, surfacing precise delivery times available from carriers in a calendar has become fairly standard when shipping groceries. However, offering specific delivery locations (such as the back porch) which most carriers won't support sets the wrong expectation with customers.

It’s The Address, Dummy…

Ultimately, most delivery problems begin and end with the address. Improving the quality and precision of your data and decisions, will have the biggest impact on delivery success.

Address Type: Differentiating between commercial and residential address sounds easy but isn't and causes a huge number of failures. Many carriers have a residential surcharge for packages incorrectly shipped as commercial. Even correctly identified commercial addresses have challenges. There are a variety of delivery restrictions that can apply to commercial addresses: limited entry outside business hours, limited weekend access, and holiday closures.

Tip: The first step is to capture the address type during address entry by asking customers. The next is to take advantage of data available from national carriers. USPS has a Residential Delivery Indicator (RDI) product and many third part vendors extend it. Special edge cases such as post office box logic and identifying undeliverable addresses can be solved using USPS’ Delivery Point Validation (DPV) data.

Simplify: Addresses are complex data that can be represented many ways. In fact, carriers have traditionally resolved poor address quality using a combination of systems and people. In 2008, I visited China to review Amazon's last mile delivery operations (inherited from the Joyo acquisition). I was astonished to learn how poor address quality was and learn the extent to which delivery success relied on the driver’s knowledge.

Tip: If you are ultimately doing delivery through the last mile, avoid textual address information in favor of geocodes - especially for international deliveries. While basing delivery decisions on geocodes is a big step forward, accuracy is challenging for large apartment complexes, rural areas and localities with limited data. When you must use a textual address, validate it. There are many address validation solutions available but it's still critical to ask customers to confirm suggested revisions. In addition to improving accuracy, this step will standardize the formatting and fill-in data gaps (such as zip+4 data for US addresses).

Carriers Are Your Friends! (Obviously not)

Respond To Failures: While I believe most carriers try to provide excellent service, profit margins are thin, limiting investment resources. Therefore, not many carriers are going to highlight mistakes which make them money. For example, requesting delivery to a commercial address on a weekend can be a big bonus for a carriers… even if the carrier is aware a business is closed, they will attempt it and charge for the failed delivery.

In addition to implementing some of the solutions previously outlined, here are a few other ideas - many obvious but surprisingly missing from many online systems:

Charge Me Twice, Shame On Me: Leverage carrier off-manifest and invoice charges to tune your systems: carriers use penalties when you do something incorrectly. For instance, carriers generally charge for ‘bad’ addresses although they may auto-correct them on their side preventing any customer impact. And they will continue to charge you for the same address until you correct it (if ever).

Choose Wisely: Audit your carriers' performance and take action. Carriers can fail and systems should adjust accordingly. For example, there are regions where one national carrier may have performance challenges while its competitors excel. Do your systems automatically opt out of future shipping assignments to poor performers and select another carrier? Not surprisingly, customers are aware of these problems which brings us to....

Deaf Ears: Integrate feedback from customer service - immediately. Customer service agents are the voice of your customers and giving them tools to fix delivery problems can be the difference between retaining or losing a customer.

Again, these are just a few of the many challenges solved by successful shipping systems. However, by implementing these basic improvements, you are on a path to making shipping seem easy.

These are just a few of the many challenges solved by successful shipping systems. As you implement these basic improvements, you begin down the path of making shipping seem easy.