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Jarrett Streebin

How Much Can Unverified Addresses Cost You in Shipping?

by Jarrett Streebin
Envelope with postage due

Last year, we talked about how unverified addresses could cost your business a ton of money. By our count, businesses can lose an average of $5 of lost postage per undelivered package. But how much does it really cost? By implementing a solution, would businesses see a significant amount of savings that make it worth it?

We ran a three-month study comparing unverified addresses against verified ones using packages processed through our API. The study covered over a million packages from a wide variety of customers. At the end, we came to three major conclusions:

  1. The vast majority of customers do NOT verify their addresses, seeing as how the unverified package data set was almost 41 times larger than the verified data set.
  2. Verified addresses improved deliverability of packages by 62% over unverified addresses.
  3. The customers that don't use our Address Verification API lose 200 packages a day to unverified addresses. Assuming that postage costs $5 on average, that's $1,000 dollars a day. $30,000 a month, and $360,000 a year that's being wasted on erroneous addresses.

To throw away that kind of money because of invalid addresses is unacceptable, especially since the problem is so easily fixed. There are several solutions to fix this kind of leakage, like an address verifier that you can integrate into your shipping system.

EasyPost's Address Verification API does just that. With our API, you can automate the entire address verification process and make sure your packages are going where they're supposed to. It's such an easy implementation, and it can be another guardrail to keep your operations running smoothly.

Because as stupid it sounds to throw money away because of an address typo, it would be even worse to ignore the problem in the face of a ready solution.