Why address validation is crucial for Shopify merchants

Why address validation is crucial for Shopify merchants

An e-commerce business must ensure that postal addresses are correctly validated in order to prevent a large number of orders that cannot be shipped because of invalid addresses. Inaccurate addresses might result from misspellings, forgotten house numbers, or any other number of reasons.

What is Address Validation?

An incorrectly typed address can be prevented with address validation or address verification. Address databases can be collected from a variety of sources. A common source is a delivery company such as the United States Postal Service (USPS) or FedEx. An address database can also come from Google Autocomplete, which is an eCommerce feature that prevents customers from typing in the wrong address. Most of the time, address validation systems automatically cross-check their database with the address the customer types in. However, these services may not serve you well if you intend to ship to many countries or just simply do not inform the customer properly about issues with their addresses.

There is a demand for address validation

Prior to adding address information to a contact database or using it for shipment or customer communication, address validation verifies, corrects, and appends the information. The purpose of address validation is to ensure the accuracy of address information before using it or adding it to a contact database.

In addition to the basics, our own address validation app can assist you in getting the most out of your addresses. The use of address validation tools can lead to better quality of service and increased marketing profitability. Depending on the situation, they can serve a variety of purposes, from protecting customer privacy to ensuring high quality of service. 

Don’t lose your customers due to incorrect addresses

What Is the Cost of Reverse Lookup Services? It depends on many things, but let's take a look at an example:

Imagine one of your customers is ordering a product worth $40 and the shipping costs are $5. Unfortunately, he/she has a typo in their address. Since the given address is invalid, the parcel cannot be delivered as expected, which at best leads to delayed delivery or at worst to a return of the parcel. Return costs are $5 as well.

In most cases, your customers won't be too pleased about not receiving their order. Before knowing what happened, they lose trust in your company and probably won't place any further orders. From your point of view, the merchant, not only will you be stuck with your product and the total $10 delivery and return fees, you'll lose a customer as well. Imagine having 10,000 orders every month. 5% of the orders placed in online stores have invalid address entries which in this case would amount to 500 orders every month and in further consequence to 2,500$ worth of delivery and return fees. You see, apart from losing customers due to a bad customer experience, incorrect addresses will also cost you a lot of money.

How address validation increases sales

Having an address validation method on your online store can increase your sales as well as prevent problems.

The best user experience (UX) is what customers seek when shopping online. They want sites that load quickly, are simple to navigate, and don't have any issues. However, that's the minimum for great UX. If you go the extra mile to enhance customer convenience, they will notice.

Having the correct version of an address selected from a dropdown menu is especially helpful for mobile shoppers, who often have difficulty typing on their devices. This is a feature that's especially helpful for customers because it makes it easier to fix a bad address. Mobile autocorrects such as Google Autocomplete occasionally make mistakes instead of fixing them, so it's much easier for a customer to fix a bad address by tapping the correct version.

This improves the user experience by making the checkout process quicker as well as simplifying things for the customer. Long, tedious checkouts are often abandoned, or discourage the customer from making another purchase.

Having address validation on your website can boost customer satisfaction, increase order processing speeds and enhance customer loyalty. All of these contribute to increased revenue.

Overall customer satisfaction will increase, so you will retain more customers in the long run. Your site provided a smooth, easy shopping experience the first time around, so customers are much more likely to buy from you again.

And of course, your business will be more profitable if you are not charged incorrect address fees!

Summary

To sum it all up, a working address validation tool you can rely on is capable of saving you a lot of money and satisfying your customers. 

You would like to try a working address validation app for yourself?