About 5% of packages are undelivered. While shoppers like to blame vendors, improperly typed addresses are the leading cause of these delivery failures. There are ways of reducing errors during the entry of addresses to reduce cases of undelivered packages. Automatic zip code lookup is one way but it only gets you so far.

Street address lookup

You could further reduce errors by providing autocomplete suggestions for a shopper’s street address. This not only minimizes typographical errors, it also speeds up checkout by saving the customer time that could have been otherwise spent typing.

Allow autofill

Browsers like Chrome and Firefox store user details like the address then automatically fill them in whenever they are required so you should make sure autofill is enabled on all your forms.

Remember…

In some countries, the street number usually comes after the street name so tweak our recommendations accordingly.

Keep it in mind that the UK uses the term postal code rather than Zip code so you will need to keep that in mind during your design.

Google Autocomplete API

The Google Autocomplete API is an excellent address autocomplete service. It is integrated with Google Maps and it suggests a customer’s street address once they type in the first few numbers. By having to pick out their address from a list of suggestions rather than typing it out manually in its entirety, convenience is greatly increased.

Google Autocomplete API is also quite affordable, charging 1.70 cents per suggestion for the first 100,000 lookups of every month. The price drops to 1.36 cents for every suggestion up to the 500,000th one. Google offers custom pricing for address lookup requests above 500,000 a month.