When was the last time you shipped 400 million of something? Probably not recently. But in the case of the United States Government, January 15, 2022 marked the start of a massive project to deliver at-home COVID tests to every residential household in America, in collaboration with USPS. Starting on that day, people could go to www.CovidTests.gov and order four tests to be shipped to their homes.
No project that large is without a few startup glitches, and this was no exception. This website allows people to order up to four COVID tests and have them delivered to their residential address. But according to Politico, people living in a number of multi-unit residences such as apartment complexes found that they were unable to order their tests – because they would enter their address, and the system would respond with an error message that tests had already been ordered for that address.
A case of address specificity
Why couldn’t these people order their tests? Because their system didn’t recognize every address of a multi-unit housing complex as having multiple residences. According to USPS, the problem sprang from some buildings not being registered as having multiple dwelling units. While this hopefully affected a small number of households, and will be fixed soon, this example holds an important lesson for anyone shipping merchandise to residential or business addresses.
How to make sure YOUR shipments get delivered
Automated address validation helps ensure that your addresses are accurate, genuine, and up-to-date. But there is one more important step as well – making sure they are deliverable. Our flagship DOTS Address Validation – US product also has some important, built-in USPS services that help ensure your shipments go to the right place when they are being sent to multi-unit addresses. These include:
Delivery Point Validation (DPV). This tool makes sure that an input address with a ZIP+4 code exists and can receive delivery from USPS – which is particularly important in cases where Apartment 201 is one family, Apartment 202 is another family, and Apartment 203 doesn’t exist.
SuiteLink (SLK). For business addresses, this tool appends known suite information for a given business. This is not only important for delivery accuracy – for example, in cases such as New York’s Empire State Building, which has its own ZIP code and over businesses – but also helps you save postage costs by sequencing deliveries to the same building.
Undeliverable-as-Addressed (UAA) Mail. We flag addresses that cannot be delivered by USPS as originally input, and often can correct these addresses to be deliverable – and can inform you when this is not possible.
You can integrate Address Validation in your business automation platforms via API interfaces, and is also bundled with tools for data entry touch points such as our new DOTS Global Address Complete autocomplete capability, as this article describes.
Next time you’re shipping 400 million of something, a little address accuracy goes a long way – and even when you’re sending a lot less than that, we can help you save time, money and headaches, with automated tools that help you get more of your shipments to the right place every time.
