Google Places, UPS Boxes, and Your Mail

It’s been a long time practice for many home based business owners to purchase a UPS box for their business, both for convenience & separation, as well as the advantage of getting an actual street address (which is not your home).  The street address can then be put into Google Places, Yahoo! Local, etc and help businesses rank for local searches.

Since this ‘strategy’ has been going on, Google introduced service areas which helped alleviate a lot of the issues related to being a home-based business.  But there are still a lot of small businesses using UPS boxes to help rank in different local districts.

I’m not necessarily saying it’s the right way to do it, but there are definitely a lot of them still doing it, and it works in many cases still today.

I have a client that has a UPS box, and he informed me the other day that the US Post Office is now ‘cracking down’ on UPS boxes.  Particularly, they are cracking down on the use of the words ‘suite’, ‘office’ and ‘room’ on UPS-bound parcels.  An item mailed to ‘Suite 100′ at a UPS box is now being rejected by the USPS and returned to the sender as a non-existent address.  If the address is changed to ‘# 100′ it is delivered as it should be.

This, of course, affects affiliate marketers as well.  I’ve heard of a few instances now where affiliate payment checks were returned because of the word ‘suite’.

Since both of the business owners I’ve spoken to use the same UPS (and subsequently the same post office), I’m not sure if this is a US-wide change, or just a local postmaster on some sort of bent against UPS, but it’s definitely worth mentioning.

If you have a UPS box, and are using the word ‘Suite’ or something other than the number symbol, and you’re wondering where your mail is, I recommend checking with your local USPS to see if they are bouncing your mail back.

Related posts:

1. Really Small Business? You Still Gotta Have an Address
2. Get Your Business on Google Maps – Correctly
3. Google Just Increased My Revenue
4. How Can I Let Google Know That My Website is UK Based?