HACKER Q&A
📣 tikkun

Which companies are used to verifying shipping addresses?


Which companies do ecommerce and other companies use to validate whether a given address exists?

I'm asking out of personal interest, because my address fails to validate on probably 3 out of 10 ecommerce sites, and I need to contact support to get it manually validated. I live in an area where USPS doesn't deliver to the houses, we're required to have PO boxes, and this means that address validation systems based on the USPS database don't work. If the address is accepted, it works fine, and our local post office has a trick where we include a number so that it gets routed to the right PO Box. Amazon handles it excellently and Amazon deliveries always succeed, though smaller ecommerce ones often fail validation (but always succeed after shipment).


  👤 anenefan Accepted Answer ✓
In Australia, many companies have started to rely on location services ... in particular google's borked version of it ... even if their map is marked correctly - they are two totally separate things. It took me a while to try and work out why I had issues validating my physical address, since I am on a boundary of a couple different regional authorities, even though there were so many bewildered and lost delivery people I would end up helping out where or which entirely different suburb they should be in even if I didn't know the exact address.

Apple's location I have found to be much sharper but few delivery services utilise their location services. Google I suspect, given how many are glaring wrong in my locale [Whitsunday - Mackay Queensland region for any google employee who'd like to protest] are simply IMO running a dark pattern and waiting for businesses to make an account to fix the obviously wrong location. However it would have also been better if they'd not simply got most location's suburb from the local phone company which labelled using the node the physical node came in from ... but on the other hand every scammer who phones up uses the wrong address gives themselves away so I guess that's the silver lining.