From Paris to Berlin and all the addresses in-between

Having spent a good percentage of your budget getting people onto your ecommerce site or into your shop there is nothing more annoying than obtaining incorrect delivery details. Obtaining correct address information in real-time at point of capture means you’ll get deliveries right first time.

Furthermore, with ecommerce being a pretty much global industry now and companies trading all over the world - a new obstacle is presented: capturing the correct address in the correct format.

Software is continuously being developed to adapt to the dynamic online world, more recent technology can cover up to as many as 253 countries (don’t believe me? Check out PredictiveAddress). It uses state of the art fuzzy matching logic to predict and autocomplete full addresses after the user starts to type. However, the fuzzy matching goes a step further and recognises alias names given to addresses or properties, for example if the user enters The Whitehouse rather than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they will still be provided with the correct address. The same concept applies to anyone, who has given a nickname to their address and the fuzzy logic applies to both residential and commercial addresses.

The benefits of using an address verification API:

• Reduced cart abandonment
• Reduced failed deliveries
• Reduced queue time
• Professional service at admission kiosks and EPOS tills
• Reduced data entry for internal systems such as CRM and ERP
• Integrates with shopping cart solutions

Getting the correct details at point of capture also reduces the need to cleanse your data once added to your database. This increases the match rate for appending further information such as telephone number and demographic profiles.

What to look for when choosing an address verification API:

• Diverse shopping cart integration, for example in Magento, Opencart and Prestashop
• Part of a suite of international validation services e.g. alongside international telephone and email validation
• Extensive country coverage
• Accessibility features to meet WCAG 2.0 to ‘double-A’ standard. These can include screen readers for visually impaired users, or keyboard access to diminish the need for using a mouse
• It comes from a supplier whose data is checked against multiple postal certifications from postal organisations

So, choosing an address validation product can be a daunting task, but ensure you ask plenty of questions and do lots of research to ensure you choose the right product for your company and service.