Address Challenges in the Middle East within the e-commerce landscape (Part 3-Final)

In this third and final part of this series of articles, will try to list initiatives and solutions that can be implemented to decrease the friction caused by the address challenges in the region and Improve the delivery and customer service experience.

Please note that this final part need to be read within the context of the previous two articles as the ideas discussed here are all connected.

What can be done by the online sellers?

The checkout page is considered the most important and final part where the intention to buy is converted into an actual transaction. Those companies spend so much time and effort optimizing this page to make it simple, quick and efficient. This is where it gets tricky to balance the time needed to provide a complete address vs. the consumer feeling overwhelmed filling details and just abandon the cart.

To obtain a better-quality address for the consumers in the region, it is recommended to follow up the guidelines below

• City and Area Validation through several drop-down menus. The address page can have a defined list of cities and areas within the city. This is extremely useful for carriers to sort into sub parts of the city. We see this trend adopted by the big ecommerce players coming out of the region but is seldom adopted by international ones probably due to lack of focus on specific region or countries.
• Separate Street name field. Street names are much more used in some cities more than others, so we can see that streets are more popular in Bahrain, Kuwait compared to UAE except for main ones (highways), however it’s worth having such dedicated field to emphasize to the consumer the importance of giving a street name.
• Building number or Name/ House Number. This is extremely important to have as it enables the courier to zoom in easily specially for known building names.
• Floor number. Again, helpful to be in the address section.
• Close by Point of Interest. As discussed previously, it’s still very common to describe and address based on a well-known landmark. Again, this is a good way to zoom in on the area/address

Promoting usage of online maps

Some leading online sellers are introducing an interactive map where the consumer can either make use of the GPS signal on his/her mobile to pin point the address, or alternatively go through a search field to locate the desired location based on landmark or simple street search. This is an accurate and useful method of pin-pointing the actual delivery address.

Luckily, the region is well supported through multiple map providers.

-Google Maps. It is considered the most common and widely used, the ability of google to merge its huge data on companies, points of interests and landmarks makes is a preferred option to many consumers.

-HERE Maps. The company provides excellent detailed maps and data to support multiple search options including landmark search, street names and building or house numbers. HERE has been in the region for a long time with a sizeable team on the ground to keep its data UpToDate. HERE maps are also considered superior to google in some countries within the region.

-2GIS. They are taking the map details to a whole different level by providing information about each building, companies occupying that building along with their contacts and very rich data about the points of interest on the UAE level.

The Carrier Side

Carriers globally are required to deliver to an address, however carriers in this region are required to do much more to reach the customer and overcome the address challenge.

Let’s look at the practices, solutions that can be adopted by carriers to tackle those challenges

• Making use of the provided address or GPS coordinates from online sellers.In previous section and articles, the idea of providing carriers with a delivery coordinate was discussed, however the whole concept of using GPS data to enable the delivery will be useless if it cannot be ultimately utilized by different parts of the carrier Operations and IT systems. So, it is extremely important to enable navigation features on courier delivery software
• Know your customer (KYC). It is about knowing your customer’s customer or the consumer. As carriers interact with the consumers on daily basis, it is extremely beneficial to build address databases that would help the carrier in identifying the details of the address in case it is not available on the package level. Carriers can depend on the consumer unique details to keep track of the consumer information.This is an in-expensive and basic system that has been adopted for so many years by the food delivery companies and restaurants.
• Carriers can also start tracking the consumers addresses by logging the exact delivery coordinates while performing the delivery. This is done by tapping into the GPS Enabled hand held device. Such capabilities are widely available in even off the shelf delivery systems and adopted internationally by many local,regional and international carriers.
• Online Address Capture tools. Such tools either depending on an interactive map or a simple address capture form have been used my multiple carriers in the region to electronically capture better addresses. Consumers are required to use such systems to fill their addresses for the deliveries to happen. The percentage of customers’ adopting such tools vary considerably. Many factors affect the success of such tools such as the time the consumer has to set the address, whether this is a Cost on Delivery (COD) package or prepaid among other factors.
•  Understanding the “Address”. With the lack of post or zip codes in this region, a more comprehensive solution to the complex address challenge would be to try to “Understand” the address. Consumers provide descriptive addresses containing clues and details about the address. Tapping into Big Data and Machine Learning Systems to correlate certain elements of the descriptive address to smaller areas within a city would be of extreme value. Building such intelligent address analysis systems would have tremendous value to the carrier as it supports many of the initiatives that were difficult to achieve as discussed in the 2nd article.

To Summarize, as ecommerce package volumes increases exponentially in this region , the challenges resulting from the fundamental addresses problems and all the inefficiencies, friction coming out of it can be reduced when online sellers redesign check out pages and processes, it can also be reduced when carriers invest in their operational systems, technology and tap into Data Science. Nevertheless, all those initiatives are secondary compared to overhauling the whole post code and addressing systems by governments and municipalities to realize much bigger benefits across multiple sectors and services.