Address verification problem

[historicfirearms]

I recently started having address verification problems while ordering stuff online. We have lived in the same house for over 40 years and I have always written my address exactly the same. Last week I tried to order some things for my old Airstream. The company called me on Monday and said they could not verify my address and couldn't print a shipping label. He even said that he put my address in Google and it didn't show up. I got a chuckle and told him to cancel my order. We live in a rural area of Michigan and I've had people tell me that their GPS couldn't find my address before, so I wasn't surprised that Google couldn't find it either. What's odd is that just a few minutes ago I tried to place an order through Home Depot online. That order didn't go through either, said they couldn't confirm my billing address. What gives? Did we fall off the face of the earth? Anybody else ever had this problem?

[flyingmonkey35]

Ask them how they are determining your address. Then double check with the USPs.

[starmac]

Ah the computer age. lol If everybody is verifying addresses, then how come I keep getting others mail??

[GRUMPA]

We live very rural as well, deliveries were rather hard to get and at times still are. When we got a P.O. box most, not all the problems went away. All we have is what they call a 911 address and nothing else.

[dtknowles]

My brother got a new address for his house, it used to be RFD XX Box XXX but now they named the road and gave him an house number. It had something to do with 911 service.

Tim

[mjwcaster]

I used to have this issue when I lived in the country before 911 addresses.
I just used to tell the vendor to ship it out with the address I gave them, it will get here.
Phone number out of one town, mailing address from another (and I was well out of that town) fire protection from the township and I didn't exist on any online database.
Had to give the sheriff directions 3 times to get to the place, and it worked better if you told them
'past the falling down barn on the curve with the cow in the middle of the road, take the next right on the gravel road continue past the falling down lean to ...'

Have you tried verifying your address with USPS?

They may have changed something.

[bubba.50]

we too got changed from rt2 addresses to 911 addresses a few years back. no problems so far from either the p.o. or u.p.s. or fed-ex except that for some reason ups & fed-ex now come in from the other direction & sometimes hafta back-up to the driveway. still occasionally get a piece of mail with the old rt2 address so, I don't know what the fuss was about.

[oneokie]

Have that problem occasionaly. Tell them that the shipping and billing address is the same. Only current issue with address is with Ma Bell. They say they have to have a 911 address to sent repair tech's out. Tech will call asking for directions, yet they have no trouble sending their monthly bill to my address.
Latest fiasco was with Sears home delivery. Spent over 30 minutes on the phone with the delivery driver talking him to the correct location. When they were leaving, the driver asked how to get to the adjoining town that he had driven through on his way to my location.

[nicholst55]

I have the exact same problem when ordering from Brownells. Their software insists that my address doesn't exist, and tries to send my order somewhere else - that I don't live. If I call, they will manually input my address and everything is just fine - for that one order. The next time I have to do it all again. I've contacted them and discussed this repeatedly, and they really don't seem to care. I guess that's how Pete (Brownell) treats customers of 35+ years. Well Pete, I really don't care either; I can get anything you sell from someone else. It's really a shame, because Brownells used to be the benchmark in customer service.

[Goatwhiskers]

I placed an order on line today and their computer wanted Louisiana as LA., not La. GW

[Kent Fowler]

I got calls from 3 different census officials telling me I didn't live where I live and that I should find out where I really lived as they were quite convinced I did not live where I live. One of them suggested I find a close neighbor and find out from them if I lived where I live. These are the people getting paid with our tax dollars.

[foesgth]

I have had that problem and I live in a very non-rural area. I find that if I use Street instead of St. the software can't find me. The same thing happens if I spell out the state instead of using the proper USPS abbreviation.

[rockrat]

We have had problems since they changed to a 911 address. Changed our street name and numbers. Fedex was the worst. They would call, saying our address was incorrect and they couldn't deliver. Would tell them to contact UPS, as they just delivered a package yesterday!! This went on for 2 years till, I guess, they updated their computers.
Won't even get into the ways my name gets mis-spelled!!

[dtknowles]

There is where you know you live and where the rest of the world thinks you live. If you want to deal with the rest of the world then you need to accept their frame of reference. If you don't care, you can ignore them. Postal abbreviations for state names were standardized with two characters both capitalized and no period more than 20 years ago. Do you use the zip code or don't you like that either.

I used to live on Zions Hill and it was that way for many decades but they changed it to Zions Hill Road and added the people who live farther out of town to Zions Hill Road when they used to live on what we called the Old Ripley Road. Their postal address were RFD.

I imagine that thousands of people got their address changed to Martin Luther King Avenue from a variety different older street names. I wonder how you could live somewhere and not know that they changed your street address? Streets and roads get renamed all the time and whether you like it or not you address is the new one.

If you travel down to the corner or cross road, is there a street sign and what does it say? If you look at a recently published map or Google Maps, what does it say?

Tim

[dtknowles]

Sorry, I reread some posts including mine and my tone was too hostile. It might be that some people know their new address but the delivery people have bad data base entries.

Tim

[mjwcaster]

Data base entries, now that can be fun.

In IL when Concealed carry started, the state had the bright idea of using 2 different databases, one international to auto fill in your address.

I had one student who we could not get her address typed in, it auto-selected addresses from France and Belgium. Finally clicked fast enough to beat the auto-fill in.

Then they would cross check it against another database and tell you your address was incorrect.
But they were the ones who picked the address in the first place!

Some times it wanted things abbreviated, others spelled out.
Things like 'county', some addresses needed county spelled out, others would fail if you spelled it out, for addresses IN THE SAME COUNTY.
Or St vs Saint, different addresses in the same town needed to be entered differently.
It was lots of fun trying to outguess the inconsistencies in that system.

The best was they would(still) fail your application if you used lower case for things like your middle initial.
Case sensitive verification, with no warnings.

And other times you didn't know if they system was in the process of crashing or not, sometimes it worked Ok, others it would keep failing. Take a smoke break and come back the system was down.


And we get to pay $150 each to deal with this system.

[montana_charlie]

'past the falling down barn on the curve with the cow in the middle of the road, take the next right on the gravel road continue past the falling down lean to ...'

I say, "Go a mile north of the elk farm, then east until you hit the end of the road."

[dtknowles]

I say, "Go a mile north of the elk farm, then east until you hit the end of the road."

You could always just give them Lat. and Long.

Tim

[lancem]

Same problem living in the 60 miles south of no where... FedEx sent me an email saying I couldn't use their free tracking service because I had a commercial address. Called the 800 number and talked to someone in Bangladesh who told me I needed to contact the USPS because they are the ones that they get their info from and I needed to straighten it out with USPS. Needless to say FedEx fell even further down my trash list, I have one driver that won't deliver to my house because "it's too far away", if you can believe that. I'm wondering isn't that his job??? Figure if I complain I'll never see any of my packages! Luckily a friend lives on the highway which is "close enough" to deliver too...

As far as not a good address goes, I tried buying stamps from USPS on line and couldn't because of "address wasn't good"... mailman delivers everyday though.... Madness...

[MaryB]

If they are shipping USPS it won't let you over ride, if the address isn't in their system they reject it. Welcome to the modern age of computers!

I used to have this issue when I lived in the country before 911 addresses.
I just used to tell the vendor to ship it out with the address I gave them, it will get here.
Phone number out of one town, mailing address from another (and I was well out of that town) fire protection from the township and I didn't exist on any online database.
Had to give the sheriff directions 3 times to get to the place, and it worked better if you told them
'past the falling down barn on the curve with the cow in the middle of the road, take the next right on the gravel road continue past the falling down lean to ...'

Have you tried verifying your address with USPS?

They may have changed something.