Economic impact of inaccurate addressing in India
Locating addresses in India has always been a challenging task to do. Since forever people have been relying on local vendors or passersby for finding an address. Butin 2020 when millions of new digital buyers came onboard, it became essential to rethink addressing in India because delivery accuracy is more important than ever.
How much does bad addresses cost?
Bad addresses not just cause inconvenience or increase the delivery time, but they have a huge economic impact too. In India the economic impact of bad addresses is huge. In a study, it was found that poor addresses cost India $10-14 Billion annually. In India addresses usually contain informal neighborhood names, local abbreviations, confusing directions and discrepancies caused by local languages being translated in English for writing. This may sound bizarre but out of 7 billion residents on Earth, approx. 4 billion don’t have clear addresses that allow their abodes or office spaces to be located on a map precisely. This is not it, 20-30% of pin-codes written are wrong. All these issues lead to parcels being misrouted and require additional effort and manual work to reroute them to the correct pin code.
How does it impact businesses?
If a logistics company wants to optimize their operations, they need to have a proper understanding of the location where goods have to be delivered. It is obvious that due to lack of precise location of every shopper’s address, it becomes difficult to make the best choice for:
- Planning routes for the “last mile” delivery executives
- Deciding the Delivery Center for performing the “last mile” delivery
- Deciding the Destination Hub for the shipment
- By making the locality information more precise, we can better optimize the above steps.
GPS location App
A more innovative way to solve the discussed problem is to replace typical addressing using a short code for every location. Say, like an Aadhar code for every address. Short coded addresses are fast and help you reach the exact location without any fuss. Pataa is one such app that allows you to create shortcode for your personal and professional address so instead of sharing full address of stress, city, landmark every time you can simply share your Pataa code and the visitor will know exactly where to come. Also, this app allows you to record your address in your own voice, this makes locating your address simpler and more straightforward. Additionally, you can add remarks to help visitor understand which route to take and which one to avoid. Say, construction work is going on a particular route or the route is congested for larger vehicles, then these details can be easily added and shared with the visitor.
For the Indian eCommerce logistics industry, the cost of the “last-mile” distribution is approx. quarter of a billion dollars yearly. But, by geocoding addresses correctly with apps like Pataa, this can be reduced at least 15-20%. So, it is high time that the industry starts using the best GPS app to streamline their operations.
