Missing postcodes cost online UK businesses £146m a year
Incorrect delivery addresses cost online UK businesses over £146m every year, according to a study released by IT firm Postcode Anywhere this week.
The Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) and Postcode Anywhere report found that every year 5.8m items ordered online fail to deliver first time because of an error in the address.
Postcode Anywhere MD Guy Mucklow said: “It’s shocking that in this day and age we still can’t seem to fill out our addresses accurately. But the problem doesn’t lie with the customer: more often it’s a result of poorly-put-together online forms and ill-conceived data capture.
“E-commerce businesses are shooting themselves in the foot if they take shortcuts with their address forms. According to our results, every delivery that fails due to an incorrect address costs an average £25.50 to put right, through refunds, redeliveries and wasted man-hours.
“Averaged out, current levels of delivery inefficiency add 70p to the cost of every single parcel dispatched in the UK, and 75p for every delivery.
“Clearly, there is a strong argument for e-tailers to take more care in how they collect customer information. It even affects customer service levels: as consumers, we’ve probably all experienced the frustrating scenario of being forced to select a US state from a drop-down box, or abbreviate words because they won’t fit in the fields.
“While we’ve learnt missed delivery levels are high, it also seems likely that even more customers will never go through with the order in the first place if they meet with a particularly troublesome form.
Postcode Anywhere has developed a technology that auto-fills an address from a UK postcode, in a bid to side-step this problem.
Mucklow said: “We asked our customers, and two thirds of them said they’d noticed a reduction in the number of items lost in the post after implementing address auto-fill technology. Over 70% agreed it reduced shopping cart abandonments.
“But as this study shows, although many of the big names in e-commerce are wise to the benefits of address auto-fill and validation, a significant percentage of vendors can’t see what they’re missing.”
The research made findings representing more than 12m online consumers, 3.5m active online shoppers and almost 800m home deliveries.
