It goes without saying the importance of an accurate pickup or delivery address. However, mistakes still happen quite frequently. The most common mistake is the difference between a commercial, non-commercial, or residential address.

The carriers consider a business run out of a home to be a residence, and therefore charge more for it. Other addresses considered ‘residential’ are farms, ranches, wineries, etc, IF there is a home on the premises. They don’t care if it’s a 10,000-acre dairy farm, if there is a house on the property, it’s subject to a residential charge. If the address is a military base or prison, there’s an extra charge due to security inspections. Public storage facilities, schools, libraries, or any other ‘non-commercial’ addresses are also subject to extra charges. If you’re unsure of the type of address it is, a handy tool to use is google maps – maps.google.com. Just enter the address and zip code, and in most case’s you can easily see what type of address it is once you zoom in. Quite often, you can even get a street view of the address.

Make sure to ask all the right questions of your customers beforehand, to avoid getting any surprise re-bills later.