Address Validation for International Shipping

 While domestic address verification is a critical part of your business, international shipping can be more high-stakes. Between shipments lost, additional service fees, and employee time spent correcting mistakes, inaccurate address data can cost your company significant dollars. Address validation can help reduce these costs and make it easier for your customers to checkout, providing a better customer experience.

Just like with addresses in the United States, there are a variety of ways that addresses are written internationally. From spelling variations to formatting differences, some countries have very strict rules for how an address must be structured. For example, Germany requires the postcode to be before the town and all letters to be in capitals. A good international address verification provider will have a tool that is able to identify these differences and provide accurate results regardless of how the address is written.

An effective international address verification tool will also be able to normalize addresses that are written in different languages such as Hebrew - Israel, Chinese - China, Arabic - United Arab Emirates, Cyrillic - Russia, Thai - Thailand, and Kanji - Japan. It will be able to convert these to Latin characters, which can then be verified and standardized according to the postal standards for each country. This ensures that your addresses are readable by the local post offices and will be able to be delivered to those locations. Whether you are verifying addresses instantly as they are being entered or you want to validate them in bulk, a good international address verification API will return the standardized, corrected, and validated address for each country.