So we’re approaching the favorite holiday of all shopping addicts. Black Friday.

This day brings a lot of joy to those who love discounts and, at the same time, puts a lot of pressure on merchants. On day X, tons of online orders flood their systems, creating a mess and resulting in shipping issues. There are many requests to process, and so many goods to deliver that managing them is extremely challenging.

The best way not to fail this year is to prepare beforehand.

Start with address verification. Address verification is one of the tools used to minimize the number of orders shipped to the wrong addresses on Black Friday and beyond. When you have accurate and mailable address records in your database, you can automate the delivery and delegate a large share of routine tasks to the software. While buyers enjoy timely shipment, you manage the situation.

More about address verification and other tips on Black Friday shipping in our blog article about:

• Black Friday shipping issues: what are the leading causes and how to prevent them
• Additional tips on how to shop and ship Black Friday orders
• Inkit’s address verification, address autocomplete, and automated communications for your perfect Black Friday campaign.

Black Friday Shipping Issues: What Are the Main Causes and How to Prevent Them

When the order is shipped to the wrong address, there is always a reason behind it. Maybe your customer has made a mistake filling out the website form, moved out without letting you know, or anything else. The critical point is that you have not taken the precautions.

Here are the main reasons why orders may be shipped to the wrong address.

Reason #1. Order is shipped to the wrong address because you have no data autocomplete

Address autocomplete services are essential to running address checks while users are typing their personal information on your website, app, or web service. First, this speeds up the registration and checkout procedures. Second, autocomplete address capture helps you ensure that customers provide information in the right format and edit their addresses when necessary. As a result, you build up a reliable database from the very beginning and enjoy improved address data quality. Without address autocompletion, you will end up having thousands of address records stored in different formats. Later on, it will take a lot of time and effort to standardize addresses and use them to provide shop and ship Black Friday services.

Reason #2. Order is shipped to the wrong address because your data is outdated

Your existing customers are unlikely to share their plans with you. They won’t show up at your door to inform you they change the address. They won’t even send an email to let you know. Therefore, updates of address information are your responsibility.

Unless you regularly run data validation checks and match your current database with the official USPS records, you will have many invalid addresses. Thus, you risk delivering packages that will never reach the necessary person and suffer from losses because of constant returns and high shipping rates.

Reason #3. Order is shipped to the wrong address because you have no automation

Automation practices eliminate the risk of human error, which is very high with manual address filling. Customers don’t usually know how to properly format the information and sometimes even fail to recall their exact address details. When you start using automated address verification and standardization tools, this problem disappears. The address validation software fixes incorrect addresses as soon they enter your system. Besides, there are a bunch of services that can help you automate the shipment process and check whether customers have received the package. For example, you can connect Inkit to your current trusted vendors’ system to manage the supply chain and automatically send orders for fulfillment.

Reason #4. Order is shipped to the wrong address because you don’t verify customers

If you run no security checks, you will have many orders shipped to the wrong address. The cases of data breach and chargebacks will also surge. That’s why any online merchants should implement address verification and AVS checks before Black Friday. While real-time address verification will enable you to make sure the delivery point address is correct, the AVS service will help verify credit card ownership before sending anything. Such double-checks make your services more reliable and prevent fraud.

Additional Tips on How to Shop and Ship Black Friday

The concept of “Shop and Ship” is used to describe the services which enable buyers to purchase items from any international store. Thanks to the well-orchestrated logistics system, you can have them delivered at the minimum fee from the closest transport hub.

Thus, if you shop and ship Black Friday orders to international addresses, you must run address verification for customers worldwide and optimize the delivery process in many other ways. Find out more tips below.

• Estimate the expected volume of purchase to shop and ship Black Friday orders effectively. You may use data from the previous years or launch the Black Friday pre-registration to determine how many leads are likely to purchase. For example, you can send them a promo code asking to register on your website and become the first to access Black Friday discounts. This will encourage customers to share their contact information and help you to better plan Black Friday delivery.
• Mind your target audience. Apart from learning the tastes of your leads, you should know their location. If they are disseminated around the globe, this will additionally complicate the shipment. To avoid the related shipping issues on Black Friday, use software that automates both local and global addresses verification and delivery.
• Outsource logistics to a courier company. Stop shouldering the processes you can easily entrust to a third-party provider. Instead, focus on marketing your shop and ship Black Friday promotions while experienced shippers do all the chores. You will reduce the number of orders shipped to the wrong address and find a reliable long-term partner for other marketing campaigns.
• Achieve a single customer view and integrate tools. To implement an order tracking system and control shop and ship Black Friday orders, you need to align all data sources. This will allow you to manage order fulfillment and related customer communications. For example, you will automatically update customers on the delivery through different channels and quickly fix shipping issues once they arise. The use of an API platform supporting multiple integrations like Inkit is the easiest way to do this.

Inkit’s Address Verification, Address Autocomplete, and Automated Communications for the Perfect Black Friday Customer Experience

Inkit is a multifunctional Reach Enablement Platform that supports hundreds of integrations scaling its capabilities. You can connect it to your CRM system to automate address verification and enrichment. This will enhance the accuracy of your shop and ship Black Friday orders and help you reach the destination each time you need to deliver something.

Inkit’s toolkit also includes address autocomplete that allows merchants to validate addresses while buyers are typing them. Thanks to this, all records in your database will initially have excellent quality and validity.

Apart from address verification, Inkit can automatically send orders to vendors for the fulfillment, deliver online and offline communications, ship coupons codes, render PDF bills or invoices, and more.

Contact our team to try out these and other features of Inkit and make your next Black Friday campaign fabulous.