Why You Should Use Address Validation For eCommerce Deliveries

Address validation can be a critical ingredient in eCommerce delivery success. With the rise of online shopping, it has become increasingly important to ensure that the addresses entered by customers are accurate and up-to-date. Even the slightest mistake in an address can result in a failed delivery, which costs you financially and damages the overall customer experience.

The bigger and more accessible eCommerce becomes, the more important address validation is likely to be. Online deliveries are reaching more and more remote areas than ever, where getting the minutest details wrong could completely derail a delivery. More and more customers means more and more businesses are starting up too - and with that competition increases. One failed delivery could be the final straw that has a customer switch to a competitor and lose faith in your brand entirely.

Just how harmful are failed and repeated deliveries to your brand perception and profit margins? We've compiled some eye-opening statistics that show just how important it is that you nail your deliveries - or catch a wrong address before the order leaves your warehouse.

How Address Validation Can Save You Money

One of the primary ways that address validation can save you money is by reducing the number of failed deliveries. When an order is delivered to an incorrect address, it can result in a return shipment, which can be expensive for both the retailer and the customer. In addition to the cost of shipping, there are also handling fees and other costs associated with a failed delivery.

6% of first-time eCommerce deliveries fail in the UK, costing an average of £11.60 per order, which scales to a huge £68k per year. Even if these numbers don't map perfectly to your business, it's clear there's a huge amount of money being lost on issues that can be easily resolved. A small tweak to your strategy could see a huge leap in profitability, just from ensuring addresses are correct before your orders are shipped.

Another way that address validation can save you money is by reducing the amount of time and resources that are spent on customer service. When a customer's order is delivered to the wrong address, it can lead to a customer service issue that needs to be resolved.

This can take up a significant amount of time and resources, and can also result in a negative customer experience. By using an address validation tool, retailers can ensure that the correct address is entered in the first place, reducing the number of customer service issues related to failed deliveries.

How Address Validation Can Improve Your Brand Perception

In addition to saving money, address validation can also help improve customer satisfaction. Finally, address validation can also help to improve the overall efficiency of the delivery process. When orders are delivered to the correct address, they are more likely to reach the customer in a timely manner, which can improve the customer experience and increase customer satisfaction. This can lead to repeat business and positive reviews, which can help to build brand reputation and customer loyalty.

The flip side is what impact a negative delivery experience can have on your business. 23% of surveyed individuals said they would no longer order from a company who failed to accurately deliver their item, while 21% said they 'lost trust' in the dispatching retailer.

What's more, 17% suggested they had advised family and friends to avoid retailers with whom they had a bad delivery experience. A poor delivery experience may not just harm your relationship with an existing customer, but also ruin acquisition of new customers, too.

Shiptheory Address Validation

At Shiptheory, we have our own Address Validation tool for eCommerce retailers looking to improve their delivery success rate and enhance the customer experience. Retailers using Shiptheory can automatically block deliveries that don't match an address, or if it's close to a recognised address, it can auto-correct to increase the chances of a successful delivery.

One of Shiptheory's customers, We Tree Kings, delivers high-value Christmas Trees. They use Shiptheory's address validation to increase their delivery threshold and keep customers happy with timely deliveries, even during the busy holiday season. By using Shiptheory's address validation software, We Tree Kings was able to reduce the number of failed deliveries, improve customer satisfaction, and increase the overall efficiency of their delivery process.

The team at We Tree Kings mentioned previous years had been marred by failed deliveries. With cargo as large and time-sensitive as Christmas trees, failed deliveries were something they needed to avoid at all costs. Davey Wallace of We Tree Kings mentioned the final straw was finding out a delivery had ended up at the wrong address 2 days after the apparent successful delivery. This drove them to use Shiptheory's address validation software to increase delivery success, and they haven't looked back since.

Get Started with Address Validation

In conclusion, address validation is an important tool for eCommerce retailers to have in their arsenal. By reducing the number of failed deliveries, improving customer satisfaction, and increasing overall delivery efficiency, address validation can help retailers save money and improve the customer experience. So, if you haven't already, it's time to consider implementing an address validation solution for your eCommerce business.

If you're an existing Shiptheory customer and are interested in getting address validation up and running, or are looking for a shipping automation platform with the ability to switch on address validation, get in touch with one of the Shiptheory team today. You can also read more about it in our Address Validation Support Guide.

Xero Integration

Xero is a public technology company founded in Wellington, New Zealand. The company has offices in New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Africa. Xero offers a cloud-based accounting software platform for small and medium-sized businesses based on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and sold by subscription. With Xero, you can automate everyday business tasks, get up-to-date financials, and run your business from wherever you are in the world.

Its key features include automatic bank feeds, invoicing, accounts payable, expense claims, fixed asset depreciation, purchase orders, bank reconciliations, and standard business and management reporting. Xero has more than 200 secure connections with banks and financial service partners around the world. Additionally, the company offers a mobile app for iOS and Android devices called Xero Touch, as well as a free API that has enabled the integration of more than 700 external applications with Xero so far.

Xero was founded in 2006 by the former director of Trade Me, Rob Drury and Hamish Edwards in a studio apartment in Wellington (ironically, the number of the apartment was 404 – the ‘page not found’ error code on web browsers). Creating a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product was admittedly a perilous move. Software that is stored and delivered over the Internet rather than being installed on the customer’s computer was scarce for small business use – Xero’s targeted clientele – at the time. The term ‘cloud computing’ was to be introduced to the business world only a few months later at the 2006 Search Engines Strategies Conference, by Google’s then-chief executive Eric Schmidt.

Xero's founder Rob Drury. Source: https://twitter.com/roddrury

Xero started its public life on the New Zealand Exchange in June 2017, supported by hundreds of retail investors that believed in Dury’s skills and vision, through a $NZD 15 million initial public offering (IPO). Nowadays, the company employs more than 2,500 people around the world and in 2019, Xero announced that they reached 1.8 million subscribers, as well as achieving positive free cash flow for the first time. Xero also supports the UK Government’s ‘Making Tax Digital’ initiative. In March 2018, Dury stepped down as CEO of Xero, continuing as a non-executive director. He was replaced in April 2018 by Steve Vamos.

You can read more about Xero’s success story and company values in this very interesting Forbe’s article by Hal Gregersen and try Xero’s word-leading online accounting software for free.

Print shipping labels directly from Xero using Shiptheory

Shiptheory provides direct integration of your Xero account with the world’s best carriers, including FedEx, DPD, UPS, Hermes, Royal Mail and more. Unlike other shipping software, Shiptheory connects directly to Xero, meaning that synching your account is hassle-free.

Within Shiptheory, you can create shipping rules to process your Xero shipments automatically and speed up your labelling process. You can give your rules specific requirements that need to be met for a consignment to fit into that rule, like weight, value, destination, SKU, and a lot more.

Shipping labels can be automatically created from Xero invoices and printed instantly using the Xero interface or our integrated desktop label printing software. At the same time, tracking numbers are emailed directly to your customers.

No more manually entering orders. Integrate Shiptheory with Xero and save time and money while eliminating human data entry errors.

See how Shiptheory's integration with Xero works in this post or watch the video below.

If you have any queries about setting up Xero, please do not hesitate to reach out to support, visit our Xero set-up guide, or create a free Shiptheory account and connect your Xero account to ship smarter and faster today!

August 2018 Update

It's approaching the end of August now and I thought this would be the perfect time to let you know what we've been working on these past few months. This is going to be a big update so I'll break it down into three sections for you which will be Carriers, Channels and Features.

Carriers

ILG

In this update we have 1 carrier integration to let you know about which is ILG. ILG were founded in 1990 and has grown to be a strong competitor within the fulfilment, warehousing and logistics services markets due to their large clientele with more than 700 clients worldwide and significant force in the logistics industry as they ship thousands of shipments every day!

if you would like to start connecting your ILG account to your Shiptheory account you can do so by clicking here and from there you'll just need to enter your ILG account information as per the picture below. When this is done you'll be ready to start booking and automating your ILG labels.

Channels

Dear Systems

The first of two channels that we've introduced is Dear Systems. Dear is a popular inventory management software that was founded in 2012 by a group of software developers and accountants who created a list of needs and wished from business owners and came together to create a software to fulfil those requests.

now unlike most of our integrations Dear have actually built into us so rather than going into your Shiptheory account to set all this up you would start setting up from Dear's side of things, we have a guide you can follow to start getting your Dear account connected here. After you've connected your account to Shiptheory you'll be ready to start automating your shipment booking from Dear!

Amazon

The last channel on this update is the eCommerce giants who started out as an online bookstore on July 5th 1994 and are now, 24 years later, the most popular online marketplace used for all kinds of goods and now you can integrate your Amazon Sellers account to Shiptheory!

Amazon has been a popular request for obvious reasons so we've now added the functionality to connect your Amazon Sellers account and import all your orders to Shiptheory from there, enabling you to automate all of your Amazon shipments and take a lot of hours manually booking in each order and spend them doing more meaningful things!

If you'd like to start getting setup with our Amazon integration you can take a look at our article detailing how exactly to do this. If you have any questions regarding this integration, I've included a link to our support page at the end of this blog so feel free to send us a message!

Features

Manual Shipments Creation

Our first feature we've implements over the past few months is one that has been long requested and one that will hopefully see a lot of use, we've now added a page where you can now create shipments from within Shiptheory!

These shipments will function just as if they were imported from a channel so your shipping rules will still apply, if you'd like to start booking in shipments through Shiptheory you can do this here. It should all be quite easy to fill in but if you have any questions or suggestions about the page feel free to let us know.

Shipping Rates

Our last feature and new implementation that we've made over the last few months is the introduction of shipping rates into Shiptheory! for now this only supports a certain group of carriers but for those carriers you'll be able to see how much each shipment has costed you as per the gif below.

If you'd like to see exactly how to do this you can follow the guide here!

That's it for August! as you can see we've been working hard to add a lot of new features and integrations for our customers.If you have any queries or questions please don't hesitate to contact our support team.

May 2018 Update

A lot of hard work has been going on within Shiptheory since the last update that was brought to you in February and I'll be able to show you the fruits of our labour within this update. You'll find out about 2 new carriers and channels that we have integrated with and that are available for you to use with Shiptheory right now!

Channels

WooCommerce

The first channel we've added this month is one that you more than likely have heard of before which is WooCommerce. If you aren't overly familiar with WooCommerce, it is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to buy and sell products from your WordPress site and allows you to run your eCommerce site with ease. This has lead WooCommerce to be a very popular choice among online businesses ever since its launch in September 2011. If you're interested in using them it could be beneficial to take a look over their website.

If you're already familiar with WooCommerce and want to connect your account integrated with Shiptheory, you can login to your Shiptheory account and start getting the WooCommerce integration setup by clicking here. When you're all setup and going, this integration will be no different from the rest and it will finally allow you to automate all of the shipping labels in your WooCommerce store!

TradeGecko

The other channel we've created an integration for this month is TradeGecko, this is another big channel that prides itself on it's inventory management capability. TradeGecko already has integrations with other sales channels like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and many others. You can read more about TradeGecko and how they could potentially benefit you here.

With the TradeGecko integration you can now automate all of your shipping labels from a carrier and have the tracking numbers sent straight back to your TradeGecko store, as you can imagine this enhances the capabilities of TradeGecko as you can stay within your store to do everything from creating the order to printing the label.

To find out more about our TradeGecko shipping integration click here

Carriers

DX

Onto the carriers that we've added to Shiptheory now. The first of the two is DX, who are logistic and overnight delivery specialists. Founded in 1970 and established in 1975, the DX Group has been in private ownership since 2006 and combines DX Network Services Ltd, DX Secure, DX Freight.

You can now connect up your DX 1-man account by adding the integration to your account, you'll just need to enter your details on the carrier settings page for DX and you'll be ready to start automating your DX shipping labels. If you don't have an account with DX just yet but you would like to set one up you can do that from here.

P2P Mailing

Our last integration for this update is the UK based packet carrier, P2P mailing. P2P Mailing are a well known logistics company that provides worldwide packet delivery. They're a carrier that has continually proven their consistency as per FedEx recent acquisition of P2P which was a big accomplishment on their part.

If you already have a P2P account and would like to get it connected up, you can go here to start getting it setup and we can help you get your P2P labels printing automatically. If you don't have an account with P2P but would like to set one up you can do that here.

That's about it for this update, four new and highly sought after integrations are ready to be used by everyone. If you encounter any issues with any of these integrations or Shiptheory in general, or even have a query you would like answered you can ask our support team and they would be more than happy to help.

February 2018 Update

It's approaching the end of February and the perfect time to let you know what we've been working on these past few months. This is going to be a big update so I'll break it down into three sections for you which will be Channels, Carriers and Features.

Channels

ChannelGrabber

Over the past couple of months, we've added a new channel to our list of integrations, ChannelGrabber. You might be familiar with them already and if you are you can login to your Shiptheory account and integrate your ChannelGrabber account right away. If you're not familiar with ChannelGrabber and would like a brief explanation of what it is take a read below.

The name of the game with ChannelGrabber is inventory management, it links all your channels together so that when you make a sale from your Amazon store, for example, ChannelGrabber will automatically update the stock on your eBay profile this is really helpful in preventing you from receiving orders for an item that's out of stock. It's a simple idea yet it's such a helpful function for a lot of businesses.

Learn more about ChannelGrabber from their own website.

Carriers

Palletforce

As you can see by the picture below, Palletforce is one of our newest carriers and they're also one of the biggest palletised freight network in the UK and are expanding all over the world, so much that they recently launched Palletforce Asia Services to capitalise even more on their popularity.

if you're interested in using Palletforce you can do so by clicking on this link here and from there you'll just need to enter various bits of information some of which are in the picture below and after that you should be ready to start booking your shipments with Palletforce

if you have any questions about getting started with Palletforce feel free to send our support team a message and they'd be more than happy to help.

Yamato Europe

Some of you might be familiar with the Japanese door-to-door delivery giants Yamato Transport, well now their European cousins Yamato Transport Europe has been integrated with Shiptheory so if you're looking at shipping with them now would be a good time to start as we can automate anything you ship with them.

Yamato Transport Europe are relatively new compared to Yamato Transport, being established in October 2nd 1986. Even being so new, you might be familiar with their logo, this is because it's the same as their parent company used, which is as popular in Japan as the Coca-Cola logo is too America. The black kitten being carried by it's mother symbolises the companies promise to take care of any items entrusted to them.

PostNord Sweden

You might not know but PostNord Sweden wasn't always PostNord, they were founded in 1636 under the name Posten AB and only recently merged with its Danish equivalent, Post Danmark A/S, in 2009 forming PostNord AB.

While Postnord itself was already an option, Postnord Sweden has now been made available, you find them by looking in your Postnord settings within the integration and you should see a drop down which shows Postnord Sweden as an option now.

If you're having any trouble with getting setup with Postnord Sweden let our support team know and we'll be happy to help.

Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfilment

Amazon are a well known sellers platform as you probably know, you can both buy and sell on there. Now we integrate with what Amazon have called their 'Multi-Channel Fulfilment' service, this essentially allows you to ship orders via Amazon even if they're from other channels that aren't Amazon.

I imagine a lot of you are interested in this considering how big of a brand Amazon are so i'll recommend you take a look at this article we've written on what exactly their Multi-Channel Fulfilment is.

Just in case you're knew to Shiptheory and want to use Amazon with us you can enable the integration by clicking on this link here.

Features

Reporting

Some of you might have already seen the first of our two new features, we have implemented a way to view your shipping metrics which is shown below.

You can access this here, a basic idea of what this does is that it provides you with the information on what and how you're shipping your goods, with this knowledge you can make the best decisions in regards to making your shipping costs as efficient as possible.

Tracking

The second of our two shipments is the new 'track' function for shipments, clicking this button takes you to the correct carrier tracking portal for that shipment, providing the carrier has a tracking portal for us to link to.

You can do this by clicking here on a shipment and clicking on the 'track' button.

It's worth noting that tracking information might not always be available as soon as the shipment is booked so it's worth waiting a day for the carriers themselves to display the information.

That's it for February! as you can see we've been working hard to add a lot of new features and integrations for our customers. If you have any queries or questions please don't hesitate to contact our support team.

Our eBay Integration Has Arrived!

Shiptheory can now be integrated with your eBay sellers account, now you can manage your entire booking and labelling process for your eBay account directly within Shiptheory!

Many of you probably already know what eBay is but for those that don't, eBay is a website that allows anyone to buy and sell pretty much anything they want on there.

eBay has been around since 1995 and has gained quite the following so it made sense for us to integrate with eBay and give the opportunity to their users to automate their labelling process as well as giving our existing users the opportunity to use eBay if it meets their needs.

eBay Integration...how does this all work?

The eBay integration with Shiptheory allows you to integrate your eBay account with FedEx, UPS, DHL, Royal Mail, DPD, Parcelforce, UK Mail and more of the worlds most popular shippers and have all your shipment details centralised into one place rather than being spread out over multiple carrier portals.

If you've seen how Shiptheory works with Magento, Brightpearl or any of the channels we have available then you already have a good head start to working with eBay.

Within Shiptheory you can create shipping rules to automatically process your eBay shipments to speed up your labelling process. You can give your rules certain requirements that need to be met in order for a shipment to filter into that rule like weight, value, SKU and a lot more.

All you have to do is mark your orders as shipped within eBay, Shiptheory will then pickup those orders and run them through your rules, electronically transfer the consignment data to the carrier, print a shipping label and pre-populate your daily manifest.

Shipment Tracking in eBay

When Shiptheory has successfully processed a shipment, the tracking number that your carrier provides us will be returned to eBay and an email containing this tracking number will be sent to your customer so they can keep an eye on how their shipment is doing.

The easier we make it for your customers to track their orders, they happy they will be with your service as a whole. You will also likely see a considerable reduction in customer inquiries regarding the status of orders you have dispatched already that are currently working their way though your shippers network.

If you have any queries about setting up eBay, please don't hesitate to contact our support team.

A Beginner's Guide to Amazon's Seller Services

Amazon is a big deal. The tech giant is the largest Internet-based retailer in the world by total sales and it's services run from selling USB cables to video streaming, cloud computing, consumer electronics ... With such a range of services under its belt, it's no wonder that remembering what everything is, what it does and how it all fits in is a task in itself! If you already an Amazon seller or are looking to get started, it's always worth familiarising yourself with their offerings to make sure you're making the most of what they have to offer and see how Shiptheory can help make the process as easy as possible.

The jewel in Amazon's crown, to the customer Amazon Prime is a yearly subscription service granting access to "One-Day Delivery on millions of items, instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV episodes, unlimited photo storage, stream a growing selection of over two million songs".

All listings on the Amazon Marketplace bearing the Prime logo are available to Prime members with free or heavily discounted, same-day, next-day or premium delivery services. It's no surprise that listings in the Amazon Marketplace displaying the Prime logo tend to get preferential positioning in category listings and help draw the prospective buyer's eye.

So how do you get the Prime badge on your listings? Amazon themselves have the privilege (of course), or you can sign up for Amazon's 'Fulfilment by Amazon' (FBA) service. There is a third option - 'Seller Fulfilled Prime' - but we'll come back to that one in a bit.

The Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) service offers Marketplace sellers of any size, the opportunity to take advantage of Amazon's massive storage, packaging and worldwide dispatch services. In the simplest terms, you send Amazon your products and Amazon takes over storage and fulfilment of your orders for you for a fee.

The secondary advantages are that this automatically enables next day and, in some places, same-day delivery options as delivery is undertaken by Amazon's delivery network. As such, your listings will also be Prime enabled and state that fulfilment is performed by Amazon. FBA listings are often ranked higher in searches, and conversion rates are widely reported to improve as a result.

What's the catch? Well, there are, of course, fees to pay for each sale and dispatch, and there are both short and long-term warehousing fees dependent on how much stock you send to Amazon to store and how much is sold or remains in warehousing. Amazon recommends keeping around 6-weeks worth of stock available.

Finally, since your order management is passed to Amazon, customer services and refunds/returns are also undertaken by them. If you don't mind others making decisions on returns and replacements, damaged stock and failed deliveries, this could be the choice for you. Amazon are a very customer-first company and will use any inventory made available to them to keep their customers satisfied.

Multi-Channel Fulfilment

Multi-Channel Fulfilment piggy-backs off of the Fulfilment by Amazon services detailed above, to offer fulfilment of sales from other marketplace channels using inventory stored with Amazon, using their dispatch services network. Advantages include not having to worry about warehousing, setting up or managing carriers services and, in some cases, quicker delivery times and cheaper costs.

Much like with FBA, fees are calculated per order on top of short and long-term warehousing fees depending on how much stock is kept with Amazon. There are separate fees for Multi-Channel Fulfilment, so it's are worth considering separately from FBA.

Interestingly, however, you don't need to be selling any of these products on Amazon's Marketplace to take advantage of these services, so this is an option available to anyone. Simply send your stock to Amazon and complete an online form to place a Fulfilment order or upload a CSV file of shipment data and Amazon will take care of the rest.

First launched in 2015, Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) offers qualifying Amazon sellers the option of having the Prime logo displayed on listings that they fulfil rather than solely having to opt into Amazon's fulfilment services. For sellers that would rather retain control of their own inventories or for whom it doesn't make sense to offsite their stock, this offers a great opportunity to have their listings more visible in the Marketplace by way of the Prime logo. It does, however, mean having to adhere to quite stringent metrics.

Seller Fulfilled Prime listings must offer the same level of service to customers as any other Prime listing, meaning free next day delivery options, online tracking options and a very high successful delivery completion rate. Prospective SFP customers will also have to complete a trial period before being allowed onto the scheme proper.

Shipping is purchased through Seller Central via Amazon-approved couriers only that have been screened to be able to satisfy Amazon's tight requirements, but each retailer will still need to have their own accounts with these couriers to purchase shipping.

At the moment, only Amazon sellers with a proven track record are being invited to apply, but since the scheme is still relatively in it's infancy this could be one to keep an eye on if you're looking to step up your offerings through Amazon in the future.

Amazon Vendor Program

If you're an official distributor, manufacturer, or are selling private label, there may other options available to you via Amazon's Vendor Program. In essence, this is wholesaling direct to Amazon who then act as the seller of your brand. This obviously can have a potentially great impact on sales numbers with Amazon essentially vouching for your product, but it can come at a cost.

Like with FBA, Amazon takes care of all order management, customer service and returns, so it's a much more-hands off option of selling. Amazon will purchase from the seller in volume but pay less and more often than not, look to undercut the competition on the Marketplace. You can continue to sell your products through your Seller Central account, but it will mean you're competing against Amazon's, often lower priced and prioritised listing.

There are two levels to the Amazon Vendor Program: Vendor Express and Vendor Central. Express is open for anyone to apply whereas Vendor Central is an invite-only scheme which offers more features but less seller control.