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Ask HN: Should Amazon maintain a canonical location for customer addresses?

by jmkd on 5/19/23, 7:34 AM with 13 comments

I live somewhere that can be difficult to locate. I understand why; the street has three different names, almost no numbers are visible at street level, house names are rarely displayed either.

On a weekly basis I have long, multi-part conversations with Amazon couriers who can't find this address, despite Amazon packages being (eventually) delivered here on a regular basis.

I would have thought one successful delivery might be enough to send useful location data back upstream for use on the next delivery.

Just yesterday, an Amazon courier said they would return a parcel unless I changed the address or went to a pick up point, because they tried to deliver and it was 'impossible to access'.

Surely there are straightforward solutions that harness the data from at least one successful delivery?

  • by kotaKat on 5/19/23, 12:21 PM

    I guess I'm going to have to ask for clarification as to which country you're in.

    In the US, the USPS runs the Address Management System used as (basically) the canonical source of mailing addresses used by most if not all couriers and you can reach your "local" AMS office by way of https://postalpro.usps.com/ppro-tools/address-management-sys... to inquire about your address. This is commonly done during new construction, subdivisions, and so on but typically starts with the postmaster in your local office forwarding onto AMS for edits.

  • by nsheodk8372 on 5/19/23, 11:11 AM

    Food delivery and taxi apps in India have the ‘drop a pin system’ to solve exactly this issue - lack of properly named streets and numbered buildings.

  • by beardyw on 5/19/23, 9:04 AM

    I was doing this 15 years ago. Enter address, here's a little map, move the pin to the correct place.

    That was not for deliveries, but that is what is needed.

  • by mrobins on 5/20/23, 1:13 PM

    Yes and it could be totally optional, or prompted after a certain # of mis-deliveries.

    I work in an office building that has a confusing address. I can easily use DoorDash and Uber Eats because they have this feature but GrubHub does not and those drivers always get lost.

    Engineering effort to efficiency gotta see this being a win.

  • by not_your_vase on 5/19/23, 7:55 AM

    This is what the "add delivery instructions" field is for. You can add notes there to help the delivery folks find you.

  • by bell-cot on 5/19/23, 8:48 AM

    It's not just Amazon. I'm on a corner, and occasionally receive packages sent to $My_Street_Number $Name_Of_Cross_Street - which is actually several blocks away - via UPS.

  • by tikkun on 5/19/23, 5:39 PM

    I've run into similar issues.

    My solution is I added signs, and delivery instructions that reference the signs.