Address verification: Why is it important for your ecommerce website?

The address is an essential part of customer identity. The inaccurate address data can result in shipment delivery to the wrong address. This causes customer frustration, loss of customer loyalty, and missed sales opportunities and has a negative impact on your brand. Therefore, we look at the information of address verification and the benefits it brings to your eCommerce store.

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This second advanced version completely differentiates from its previous one. Thus, if you are using Claue version 1 and want to update to Claue version 2, you can only rebuild a new website rather than update from the old version.  Now, let’s get back to the main topic.

1. What is address verification?

address verification

Address verification is the process of capturing and cleaning your contact addresses. In addition, address verification ensures that your address data is accurate, up-to-date and standardized.

You can verify address information everywhere you collect data on your website, your CMS, in call centers, or existing addresses in your database. This ensures your data is clean and complete for use. Besides, address verification enables better data-driven decisions, and reduces unnecessary costs. Then, it improves customer service and brand satisfaction.

2. Different types of address verification

Drop-down verification: Studies have shown that approximately 55% of top 100 US online businesses make use of this type of address verification. From the drop-down menu, your customers are given the option to choose their city, state, and country.

Partial verification: This type of address verification is being used by approximately 22% of the top 100 US internet businesses. With this type, when a customer enters their zip code, the city and state fields are automatically populated, while the rest of the data is manually entered.

Post-entry verification: This type of address verification is used by approximately 13% of the top 100 US online retailers. After a customer enters their data manually, a pop-up shows up with possible address alternatives. Then, the customer chooses the alternative that matches their address.

Type-ahead verification: This address verification is only used by 6% of the top 100 US retailers. It suggests accurate addresses for customers the moment they start typing their addresses. This helps them save a lot of time and energy.

types of address verification

3. Why is address verification important for eCommerce business?

Increase conversion

According to studies, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.57%. That is caused by a long or complicated checkout process. The less time a customer spends on the checkout page, the less likely it is they’ll change their minds and abandon the cart. Therefore, it’s important to simplify the checkout process in every eCommerce store. An effective way of doing this is using address verification. It helps you to autocomplete forms as soon as enough identifying information has been provided.

Avoid pop-ups

Customers don’t want to see a pop-up announcing a problem when they submit their order. Real-time address verification can check each field as they enter it and let them know if there’s a problem. In most cases, the customer entered the incorrect information by the accident. Then they will fix the problem when it’s presented in this manner.

Correctly format addresses

In order to get the best results in shipping, addresses need to be formatted in a specific way. Address verification helps your business ensure that addresses are always formatted in the correct way for a given destination. Furthermore, this is particularly important if the store ships out of its home country and needs to format addresses in many different ways.

4. The factors to look for in an address verification plugin

address verification plugin

There are a number of address verification plugins that offer a different set of features. However, a useful address verification plugin must have the following features:

Precise text processing

While typing the address, most users don’t enter their addresses in the typical address format. They miss out on some letters, numbers, or blank spaces. Then the address verification API will validate for misspellings, spaces, and capitalizations. The plugin should return close to possible address suggestions for the user to validate.

International address verification

If a potential international customer sees the address verification and autocompletes- address fields related to their region, it will have a positive impact on your business. In addition, your store will have positive brand awareness and reach wider.

Don’t just ask for zip codes

Some of the address verification APIs ask only for zip codes to validate addresses. However, this method is not effective for all countries because some countries don’t have zip codes in their addresses. A useful way would be to use a plugin that allows users to type in the address itself.

Autocomplete address fields

If you use the address verification with autocomplete fields, the checkout process becomes simpler. More specifically, the customers don’t have to type in the complete address. Instead, they can just start typing the address and choose the correct address from the suggestions. Depending on the API you use, the address suggestions might differ.

Address type

Some of shipping services have different rates depending on whether the address is residential or commercial. They can offer slightly lesser rates for residential addresses. Therefore, the address verification plugin should be able to detect the type of address entered by customers.

Validate address manually

No matter how good the address verification API is, your business should let users verify the address manually. It is a plus point if the API offers both automatic and manual confirmation options.

Edit address

The address verification API may not return the complete address of the customers. Hence, you need to give the capability customer to edit the address returned from the autocompleted suggestions. This will help when your customers have apartment numbers, building numbers, and other elements that have been missed by the address verification API.

Conclusion

Collecting accurate customer addresses at the checkout process is crucial to your business. It makes sure that your product will successfully make it to your customer. Some type of address verification allows you to enjoy better conversion rates and provide a great customer experience. Contact us at magesolution.com to get more information.