ThinkGeek is an online retailer of quirky clothing, TV, game and movie collectibles, electronics, gadgets and a whole lot more. Whether customers are shopping for a loved one that’s into science or science fiction or just indulging their inner geek, ThinkGeek provides an ‘out of this world’ shopping experience and has adopted Loqate address verification as an important component in its checkout process.
Every expanding ecommerce business has to look at how it improves its customer journey and online buying processes, deploying address verification from Loqate in our website was one part of this. It has helped us reduce certain resources such as carrier assessed address correction fees.
Loqate simply works and works well. It was straightforward to implement and has improved customer address data and ultimately reduced mail delivery failure.
For us, it is hugely important to validate customers’ addresses because the fees associated with mail delivery failure can be very costly, as well as resulting in a bad customer experience. They are disappointed, and it costs us additional money to make it right. The process of having to resend something increases the postage cost to fulfil the order then you also end up paying either address correction fees to the carrier or return postage fees for an undeliverable package. These fees vary from carrier to carrier, of course, but range from one dollar to ten per package.
There are other real bottom line costs associated with reshipments – such as customer service time and warehouse repackaging costs. Additionally there are other costs that maybe less easy to determine. For example customer alienation, which is not necessarily isolated to a handful of customers as they are likely to share a bad experience with friends and family.
Loqate was a clear winner increasing revenue per visitor by roughly 1-1.3%.
The Loqate address verification technology works very differently from traditional US address look-up that validates post data entry. We chose to work with Loqate's solution, which validates addresses as they are entered, because it makes much more sense. The experience speeds up the customers’ address entry while also cleansing the data. Since this occurs at input we do not need to add more friction to the checkout process by validating on form submit and then prompting the customer again. Loqate verification mitigates the problems associated with raw data such as inaccuracies and reformatting errors. We were pleasantly surprised by how our site conversion rate increased after testing the Loqate address verification technology.
We chose Loqate over other possible vendors largely due to the ease of integration, the breadth of coverage (both US and international postal codes), coupled with an improved user experience. We did a thorough A/B test prior to the service’s deployment and Loqate's tech was a clear winner increasing RPV (revenue per visitor) by roughly 1-1.3%.
It simply works and works well. It was straightforward to implement and has improved customer address data and ultimately reduced mail delivery failure.
Steve Weiskircher, Chief Information Officer, ThinkGeek