I had a book to ship out today that, when I went to buy shipping, offered no USPS options. Tried buying from other sites, but it showed as an invalid address.
Okay, no big deal; there are places that USPS doesn’t deliver, so I’ll use the UPS option that Amazon is giving me.
Which turns out to be UPS Surepost, which hands off to USPS for the final delivery! We’ll see what happens; I suspect that it’s one of those small-town things where just the name will get it there.
I don’t believe that Surepost checks with the USPS to verify addresses.
When this happens, I try to google.maps the address and decide what to do based on what I can find.
Google the address …
If it is a small town, there is a good chance that mail is delivered to a mailbox at the post office (our town is like that). Most small towns know which box the address goes into by name.
Sometimes, you can go onto USPS.com and purchase the label.
I had something similar a few months back. I messaged the buyer and he replied that he lives on an island with no home delivery, he gave me a PO Box number to use but said it wasn’t really needed because the PO knows everybody and they all pick up their mail there.
Of course I couldn’t edit the ship to address to get the USPS option from Buy Shipping, so I bought the label from Endicia. UPS was much more expensive, probably because it was an island.
Tried that; didn’t work. Depending on what part of the address you used, gave different results.
Yeah, that’s what I expect. Tiny town.
Bought the shipping through Amazon, so should be covered.
Another approach is to message the customer and ask them if they have both a “street address” and a post office box number. Many people think that Amazon is going to deliver everything they order in an Amazon truck, so they give the street address even when that is NOT the mailing address. I have a lot of very rural customers, and this is common. I encourage them to add BOTH to their Amazon profile, so they can get anything from anyone, even sellers who do the own shipping. Amazon does not explain this, as they think that everyone lives in Brooklyn or something.
Good idea. Of course, the problem is that thanks to the current situation with Amazon shipping, I didn’t discover the problem until right before it had to be shipped.
Update: tracking shows delivered yesterday (Monday). No idea how that last mile happened.
Put the tracking number into ups.com tracking. There should be a link to expand the day by day transit. From there, you will see the day when it transferred to USPS. Sometimes a new USPS tracking number will appear. Use that tracking number (or the original one if no new one was added on UPS site) and go to USPS.com and put the tracking number in. It normally will show the delivery (and prior transit with USPS).
That worked. Got “Package transferred to post office” at 1:58, and “Package delivered by local post office” at 2:04.
Points to the guess being right that there’s probably a PO Box, or else just everyone knows everyone.