The address field

The checkout asks for a postcode. The customer is in Jeddah.

Most of the direct-to-consumer stack that lands in this region was built in London or somewhere like it, where an address is a string that resolves to a door. Postcode, house number, street. The form was designed for that, so was the courier integration, and the delivery promise on the product page assumes both.

In much of the region an address is a landmark, a building colour, the mosque on the corner, and a phone call from the driver. None of it is a string. The form has no field for any of it, so the customer types something into the box that will accept it, the courier's system reads that as an address, and the first attempt fails.

In an ordinary week that is a cost. At peak it is the largest unplanned marketing cost of the month, and it appears in no marketing report.

Count what a failed first attempt does. The parcel goes back to a depot that is already full. The driver calls, on a day with forty other calls to make. The customer, who paid for a promise of two days, is now on day four and has started to doubt the brand, on exactly the order the campaign spent the most to win. If the order was cash on delivery, the doubt has a refusal in it. And the second attempt is paid for by somebody, usually the brand, out of a line marketing has never been shown.

The campaign was planned to the click. The click was planned to the checkout. The checkout was planned to the courier handover. Then the plan ends, and the customer's experience carries on for three more days, in a phone call between a driver and a person describing the colour of a gate.

That call is where the campaign ends. Nobody in marketing has ever heard it.