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

7 points by jmkd ↗ HN
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?

13 comments

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not_your_vase
This is what the "add delivery instructions" field is for. You can add notes there to help the delivery folks find you.
jmkd
Used it in every way I can think of. It doesn't work. Even when it works, it still requires each courier to interpret and follow instructions, when a simple map pin would get them there without delay...
WantonQuantum
Real conversation:

“Why did you go to the south tower? I wrote north tower in the delivery instructions.”

“Uhh, I didn’t read the delivery instructions.”

bell-cot
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.
beardyw
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.

nsheodk8372
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.
jmkd
Yeah, it's an easy fix. Couriers routinely waste 20 minutes finding my place, scale that up and surely there's an incentive to resolve it.
jklein11
Not if Amazon isn’t paying for the delivery drivers time
abhayhegde
More often than not, it is still hard to locate the floors.
kotaKat
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.

jmkd
Spain. Pretty sure it's very different
tikkun
I've run into similar issues.

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

mrobins
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.