I agree snail-mailing needs a revamp. Their service would be interesting if I could use their API to send mail to an international country from the US and their edge centers sent it from within that international country. That way the mail would get there much faster than the traditional route.
Isn't it best to rely on a cloud service for this kind of thing? Addresses are being created and being changed every day, a local database would quickly become outdated.
His was only ZIP Codes. USPS only publishes ZIP Code updates once monthly, if I recall right. Technically they are copyrighted by the USPS and you are supposed to obtain a reseller license to publish official ZIP Code data.
The rate of change is very low, maybe a dozen changes per month at most. It wouldn't be unreasonable, depending on the app, to keep it reasonably up to date.
You could also have the app phone home every few days asking for up-to-date data,
or diffs, and storing it locally (it shouldn't be that big). Then release a new version every now and then with roll-ups.
Yes, I've been using it with a web service as a backup, but having it embedded in an app makes for a super fast and responsive city/state lookup on devices with potentially flaky connections.
Only way to judge is to test it out. Our data comes from the local post office of every country. We have street level address verification. Happy to give you some free credits to try it yourself just email me.
We don't claim to be perfect and nobody is. Some countries have greater detail in their postal system than others do which affects accuracy. We have an internal grading system for each country we support detailing exactly how much information we have (larger/developed countries we typically have 98% coverage for street or building level). For those interested, feel free to email me harry@lob.com for additional details about a specific country.
Address Verification is a slightly easier prospect than (for example) natural language geocoding or identity verification. Canonical street addresses are generally understood for a particular jurisdiction and many postal services keep 'common name' dictionaries as well - they've been doing this for a while, after all.
I am curious to know how do you verify these addresses? what methods you use? I recently built one for a client using Google maps api and it was not as easy and accurate as I thought.
We use data provided by local post offices from the country you specify. It was really hard to build, aggregate the data, and than standardize the input and output. Would appreciate any feedback you have on it.
I have been researching this topic and it seems to me that many countries use varying depths of administrative division levels in their postal systems. Your api seems to stick to a single "state". Do you just assume that the first major division under country, and will you ever support more granular divisions?
SmartyStreets [1] is another provider, not free though. It seems they can do a lot more than verify, like their autocomplete (client side) -- pretty slick. [2]
Looks like SmartyStreets is limited to just the US and charges $1000 for unlimited lookups. Lob also autocompletes addresses if not entered fully as well and is FREE for unlimited lookups. I'll also add their data set from the USPS is the same that everyone uses (including Lob) for the US. The real challenge with address verification is international which Lob is able to provide.
I'll have to sign up for Lob's API to try it out. That price point is quite different.
I didn't mean completing missing info, I meant a real time client-side autocomplete widget as you type the address akin to what you'll find on Google Maps. I don't see that on Lob's demos -- I don't think they expose enough data for it through the API.
I understand they are all using the same data -- are they using the same tool/algorithm for it?
What's the source of your Australian data? The AusPost data is rather expensive, and most providers have somewhat awkward APIs and/or enterprise sales models that get tricky to navigate. Having somebody to abstract that out to would be fantastic.
How do you verify the data for Middle Eastern countries which don't really have street address systems or zipcodes, and only use PO Boxes? Just check that the PO Box exists?
Neither Fedex or UPS offer street level international address verification like we do. UPS only covers USA and Puerto Rico for street level and Fedex only covers USA.
The USPS is where we get our data from...we have a layer of abstraction in case you don't want to deal with SOAP and XML and want something simple via REST.
It wasn't free when I inquired about it a few months ago, as we didn't have a product we were shipping, but needed the address for contactability and verification.
This would be awesome if it delivers on its promises. How can we know your global address verification works? Can you publish some more information to boost confidence?
Also, I would love to integrate this with my app, but $0.15 is pretty steep when you consider the use-case, where margins can be pretty tight and prices are low. A tiered pricing structure would be much more attractive where once volume ramps up you're paying closer to $0.05 per lookup.
Would happy to give you some test credits to validate our data source. Also we do offer tiered pricing, please feel free to contact me directly for more details.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 96.9 ms ] threadThe rest of their tools look good too. Snail-mailing is sadly still essential to business and needs a workable API.
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/store/service/?id=59a168b8...
The rate of change is very low, maybe a dozen changes per month at most. It wouldn't be unreasonable, depending on the app, to keep it reasonably up to date.
Address verification is a pain; if I could get someone else to do that for me that would be nice.
[1] http://smartystreets.com/products/liveaddress-api/pricing#qu...
[2] http://smartystreets.com/products/liveaddress-api/demo
Have not had a chance yet to use this in a project.
I didn't mean completing missing info, I meant a real time client-side autocomplete widget as you type the address akin to what you'll find on Google Maps. I don't see that on Lob's demos -- I don't think they expose enough data for it through the API.
I understand they are all using the same data -- are they using the same tool/algorithm for it?
http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/bussol/browse/addressvalida...
http://www.fedex.com/us/developer/product/basics.html
Also, I would love to integrate this with my app, but $0.15 is pretty steep when you consider the use-case, where margins can be pretty tight and prices are low. A tiered pricing structure would be much more attractive where once volume ramps up you're paying closer to $0.05 per lookup.
I'm very interested in such a service, but this does not look serious at all...
state and zip are required fields. Ireland, for example, does not have zip codes...
full list of such countries: http://hellowahab.wordpress.com/2011/05/24/list-of-countries...
and here is an example from Drupal where it failed the state requirements: https://drupal.org/node/636464
Lebanon, Serbia, Singapore for example do not have state information.
Also how do you handle, UK Postcodes, and Counties?
http://www.strikeiron.com/product-list/address/north-america...
http://www.strikeiron.com/product-list/address/international...