September was a busy month for the Autoaddress team. The Irish eCommerce Awards at the Mansion House in Dublin was a chance to celebrate the retailers we work with, while the eCommerce Expo in London put us in front of hundreds of retailers and logistics businesses dealing with the day-to-day reality of getting orders to the right doors. Below is a short round-up of both events.
Irish eCommerce Awards, Dublin
First up was the Irish eCommerce Awards where we were one of the event sponsors. Several of our customers were shortlisted for awards on the night, including An Post, Shaws, Musgrave and Agri Direct, and the awards gave us a chance to celebrate their successes alongside them. We have worked with many of these teams for years, and we know how much effort goes into the operations that sit behind a smooth online experience, so seeing that recognised on stage was a huge bonus.
Autoaddress was proud to sponsor the Delivery & Logistics Partner of the Year category. It was a well-deserved win for WaveOMS, whose entry stood out for solving a very real problem with clear evidence of an impact on efficiency and costs. Delivery and logistics is where we sit, so it was certainly a category we were happy to be associated with.
We were delighted to be part of the event, as there is a huge amount of talent in the Irish eCommerce industry that does not always get the attention it deserves. Ireland is often grouped with the UK as the same market, but the innovation seen from retailers on this island is remarkable. The eComm Live events this year have been consistently excellent, and we want to say a huge congratulations to every winner and finalist at the awards!
eCommerce Expo, London
Then last week we headed to London for the annual eCommerce Expo. Two days on the stand were a useful reminder of how consistent address problem are once you start talking to people! The retailers we spoke to were of every size, from founders still building their first store to teams processing tens of thousands of orders a month, with many using platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce.
Some themes quickly emerged among our conversations, such as existing out-of-the-box solutions provided by some large eCommerce platforms not quite fitting the bill. A customer may type in their address and get a digit of the postcode wrong, or the apartment number chosen from the dropdown doesn’t populate on the form. And nobody has noticed until the parcel doesn’t arrive.
One Head of eCommerce assumed that the addresses coming through their website were fine, until the customer service team told them otherwise. An eCommerce Manager from another business had the same issue, but it was the finance manager raising the concern after noticing an increase in reshipping costs. It’s interesting that the same problem can be felt in different departments depending on the company, but in almost every case it surfaces somewhere downstream of the checkout, long after the order has gone through.
Another theme that cropped up was around the manual loop where a bad address is caught late, someone has to correct it by hand and then contact the courier to update the delivery, wasting both time and money. Some retailers were having trouble getting addresses cleanly into their carrier systems at all. That led naturally to conversations about verifying addresses that are already in a system, whether it’s an OMS taking orders from several channels or a business with a large existing customer database that need validating in bulk.
Fast commerce was also mentioned a few times, i.e. when a retailer promises same-day or next-hour delivery. In this case, the address has to be accurate, which is the part we already have covered, but it also has to be quick, because a customer ordering for delivery within the hour is not going to type out a full address. It also has to work well on a phone, since that is where most of those orders are placed. Thankfully, our autocomplete usually finds the right address by around the third keystroke, and the form is optimised well for small screens.
A Huge Thank You
Thanks to everyone who stopped by the stand in London, and to the eComm Live team for another great night in Dublin. If you missed us at either event and would like to see how address lookup and verification could work for your store, you can try Autoaddress free for 14 days or get in touch with our product experts directly.
