How to write a mailing address: different formats, examples and tips

How to write a mailing address

Writing a postal address can be very simple in all those cases where the recipient is located in the same country of the sender, or, in a country where the postal system follows an identical or similar format. Shipping from one state to another in the US, for example, is not that difficult for a US citizen, nor is it difficult if the shipment is destined to a Canadian address which uses a very similar format. Even within the European Union the addresses of most countries respect the same format. However, if we move to the East or other areas of the world, we will have to understand precisely how to write the address for that country, in order to avoid making mistakes that could slow down or even prohibit the delivery. This is true for individuals and, most importantly, for companies or e-commerces that find themselves, more and more often, having to handle international or even intercontinental shipments.

In business and commercial scenarios, writing a postal address according to the guidelines established by the postal system of the target country means being more competitive and results in quicker delliveris, having full control over orders, returns and shipments in general. Writing addresses correctly becomes a competitive advantage of enormous importance, which will continue to increase in the months and years to come as globalized business increases. How do you achieve the ambitious goal of writing the postal addresses of any country correctly? Before going into the merits of the possible solutions, let’s take a look, through a series of plausible examples, at some formats of postal addresses from countries in various areas of the world, in order to understand what differences exist from one country to another.

7 advantages of address validation and geocoding

Advantages of address validation and geocoding

Companies, ecommerce businesses and professionals can benefit enormously from the validation and geocoding of postal addresses. In frequent and purely technical operations, like data entry, or for specific task objectives, like sending advertising material to a precise geographical area, can really take advantage on address validation and geocoding through specific software or an online portal; these substantial benefits can’t be matched by any other IT system, much less manual. Let’s just think what happened about twenty years ago, when the correction and insertion of postal addresses was still done by hand by secretaries and employees. Over time, technology has made great progress, reducing the margin of error and speeding up the work of millions of people around the world.

The increase in security on the one hand and the reduction of timing on the other are not the only advantages associated with address validation and geocoding performed with software like ours. Alongside these two very important results, it is indeed necessary to keep in mind lesser known, but no less decisive, aspects. It is clear that validation and geocoding – i.e. cleansing up one or more addresses and then turning them into geographical coordinates – have very different applications (with more or less evident advantages depending on the scenario in which we are), but some advantages deserve to be explained and argued in more detail so even the most inexperienced users have the opportunity to evaluate the offer of a complete validation and geocoding service without doubts and possible misunderstandings. Find out for yourself what benefits you could get from these processes!

1) LESS WASTE OF RESOURCES, TIME AND MONEY

As it is easy to guess, the first and most immediate advantage of a validation of postal addresses concerns the optimization of resources, time and money spent to manage your own work and your company’s work. In every business sector, the use of validation software ensures a substantial cut in waste in favor of greater efficiency and a net increase in performance. Operations that were previously managed by two or three people can be carried out in a few steps by a single person in charge, leaving the bulk of the checks and corrections to the validation and geocoding program. In this case, the system takes care of everything we want, from the normalization of the addresses to the merging of duplicates, from the translation of postal data into other languages ​​to the transliteration into alphabets other than the original one. All much faster than the fastest computer specialist.

The 5 best practices to improve the check-out procedure of your ecommerce business

How to improve check out ecommerce

The check-out procedure of an ecommerce business is a crucial moment in a user’s shopping experience. It is at this stage that the person finalizes his efforts and buys what he wants: if something goes wrong, the most likely consequence is the abandonment of the procedure and the website. For those who sell, this abandonment turns into an economic loss at the moment and, in many cases, even in the future if we consider the additional purchases generated by a returning (loyal) customer. It is, therefore, very important to facilitate the data entry by the customer as well as the payment procedure: not all entrepreneurs pay due attention to this phase, which is the most important for getting profits from an online sales business. Forgetting to take care of the check-out phase and not make it intuitive, quick and usable from any device is a serious mistake that could compromise the outcome of an ecommerce business, despite having sufficient sales potential.

The experience in this sector teaches us that some best practices can improve the performance of a virtual store, whether small or large. If we set some priorities in the long list of measures necessary to improve the check-out phase, we can identify some interventions that should be implemented immediately. Hereinafter, we have selected five practices, all crucial for providing a modern user experience in line with the expectations of an audience who is more and more used to shopping online. So, what are these best practices? Let’s take a look at them one by one in detail, starting with the offer of alternative payment systems.

1) EXTENDING THE PAYMENT METHODS (EVEN IN INSTALLMENTS)

An excellent prerequisite for not betraying the good will of the potential customer during the check-out phase is to offer him several payment systems. By now, all ecommerce businesses offer different options, such as the bank transfer or the payment via PayPal, but not all of them are in step with the times, offering, for example, alternative and smart methods such as Satispay (i.e. a mobile app). In recent years, special software for paying the amount in installments have spread  exponentially and now it is possible to pay in 2, 3, 4, 5 or more monthly installments. Among these systems, already available in Italy, we can bring up the following:

  • Klarna
  • Soisy
  • Scalapay
  • Smallpay
  • Dilapay
  • Findomestic

Some of these systems are well established, while others are still in development and have significant growth margins. Certainly, making them available in your ecommerce business at the time of check- out can make a big difference, especially if the products on sale have prices above 200-300 Euros. The costs for those who manage the ecommerce business are quite accessible and the installation is simplified by the plugins and APIs provided by each platform.

2) OFFERING THE OPPORTUNITY TO BUY AS A GUEST

In a world where everyone is on the run, filling out personal details as a buyer should take seconds. To speed up the procedure even more, some ecommerce businesses have introduced the variant of purchasing as a guest, that is, as an unregistered user. In this case, it is sufficient to enter only the name and email address, then the system will automatically send an e-mail to confirm the purchase and call up the possibility of registering. This is also something to keep in mind for those ecommerce businesses that sell digital products and are not bound to the actual shipment of goods (and therefore don’t need a postal address). In any case, it can help all online sales websites as well, as long as this does not cause confusion for a user who expects to enter his complete data (i.e. personal data and address).

Discover the free demo of the Address 4 software for your ecommerce!

3) PROVIDING A CLEAR RECAP OF THE ORDER

People who buy a product are quite careful about what they are paying for, especially if the amount is high. Therefore, to improve the checkout procedure, it is advisable to provide all the relevant information, from the list of products in the cart (with their relevant price) to the shipping address provided. These pieces of information are usually reported in sequence, but they must remain clearly visible and editable by the user. Indeed, it often happens that the buyer changes his mind during the procedure, before completing the checkout phase, for example because he sees the VAT and the modified amount, or because he realizes that he has entered incorrect data (we will see in the last point how to solve this inconvenience). Providing a clear summary is an effective way to improve the purchase process and prevent our customer from getting annoyed to the point that he abandons the order or stops adding other products to his cart.

4) CLEARLY SHOWING THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF USE

The terms and conditions of use of an ecommerce business should be clearly specified and the text should be given on a dedicated page. This is not only for legal reasons due to legal obligations to protect the consumer, but also for obvious reasons of transparency: in case of doubts at the very last moment, the user could search for information on the seller, such as the seller’s registered office, the methods of return or other. Furthermore, digital products and items that are subject to the minimum return period of 14 days should be accompanied in the checkout by a note similar to this:

I agree to lose the right of withdrawal as soon as I make the purchase

To process documents like these, including legal terms, it is advisable to consult a lawyer or specialized online platforms such as Lexdoit. This not only increases the chances of conversion, but, at the same time, it allows you to fulfill legal obligations as required in the digital environment.

5) GUARANTEEING THE CORRECT INSERTION OF THE ADDRESS

Finally, we come to the last point, the correct insertion of the address. What do we mean by this best practice? The answer seems obvious, but it is not. Many buyers, even regular ones, miss this step because they do not realize that they have omitted their house number, or they have written the wrong postal code, and so on. This applies to the shipping address, billing data or personal data if the purchase is carried out by a private individual. The problem that arises in these scenarios depends on the system used for data entry. The most popular hypotheses are two as follows:

–      Manual data entry

If the data is entered manually without proper checks, the risk of having a wrong address or inaccurate data is quite probable. Indeed, the user, because of haste or distraction, may not realize that he has made a mistake, and it is not certain that the error will be discovered by those who manage the shipping service. The outcome could, therefore, be disastrous: the package won’t arrive, the delivery will be delayed, a customer will be dissatisfied or invoicing will have to be redone!

–      Guided data entry

This second mode involves the assistance of a plugin or software using API functionality (or a virtual automatic system). The first advantage is that the insertion uses auto-completion, a function that is very similar to Google’s suggested searches: when the user types the first part of the address, the only possible alternatives are suggested directly in the form to be filled in, thus avoiding possible errors, discrepancies and omissions.

Whether the address has been entered with the assistance of Address4 or not, the Admin who uses our software can always choose to carry out a reclamation of his list of addresses and consequent geocoding to correct any errors and obtain the right geolocation. Accuracy is, therefore, combined with the flexibility of use in every business project.

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CHECKING AND VALIDATING DATA WITH ADDRESS 4

If you are looking for a professional system to ensure foolproof customer data entry, Address 4 software is the solution for you. With Egon, you can integrate a checkout form for collecting each customer’s data in a safe and reliable way. Thanks to extensive coverage (over 250 countries worldwide), and thanks to real-time data correction and check features, Address 4 improves the sales rate of your online store, even if it manages significant volumes of orders every day. You can configure our software via plugins, with API or with the assistance of our technical team. Try the free demo to understand the potential of Address 4 in address validation and give your ecommerce business an edge!

 

 

How to convert addresses into geographical coordinates

How to convert addresses into geographical coordinates

The process of converting addresses into geographical coordinates is used in many areas for a very specific purpose: to obtain latitude and longitude values ​​from a physical or postal address. This operation, defined in technical jargon as “geocoding”, allows you to convert one or more records entered by hand or by file into various formats in a safe and fast way. Once the geographical coordinates have been obtained, it will be possible to carry out further complex operations, such as triangulation on the map to calculate the shortest route between the starting point, the arrival point and the passage point in order to reduce the fuel consumption of a vehicle and optimize the delivery time. Therefore, geocoding opens the doors to new and important business and market opportunities in sectors such as transport, logistics, shipping and more. But how do you get an error-proof conversion of addresses into geographic coordinates? What software do you use and how can you solve geocoding needs for databases containing up to hundreds of thousands of addresses? In this article, we will try to understand how to face a conversion in a workmanlike manner without any special skills and from any device, including mobile devices.

TRANSFORMING ADDRESSES INTO COORDINATES STEP BY STEP

Understanding how the transformation or conversion of addresses into geographic coordinates takes place is essential to recognize the risks and benefits of a software-automated process compared to a manual operation. Indeed, if once it was inevitable to process data with analog systems of dubious precision and scarce practicality, nowadays modern technologies ensure a perfect performance of geocoding at reduced costs and with zero margin of error. Everything is done with the help of validation software that can also manage requests for geocoding, or the conversion of addresses into geographic coordinates. These computer programs work according to a proven and, as we have seen, error-proof procedure. Through a series of steps in rapid sequence, the addresses are checked and reclaimed until the final transformation into geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude). In this regard, we report the most important steps performed after launching a query with Address4 software:

  • address check, first of all, the addresses are examined in order to find the right matches, or at least the most likely matches between what is uploaded and what is present in the database. Entering a non-existent phrase or address, for example, will produce an error, while entering a correct (or existing but with errors) address will lead to the next step.
  • completion and updating, the address, at this point, is enriched in the missing parts and the obsolete values are updated. The addresses that miss a datum, such as the territorial code or the house number, will be completed in real time by the software with extreme precision and with information verified day by day.
  • address conversion and geocoding, the final step is the transformation of the address into geographic coordinates, with coverage that reaches 250 countries around the world. All this in a few seconds in the case of a single request or a few minutes for a file with hundreds or even thousands of addresses.