Address Verification Software

Last month, I was working on an Order processing application in which the customers had to provide their shipping addresses as a part of the final step. My boss mentioned that prior to shipping, these addresses had to be verified to ensure they were valid deliverable addresses.

My initial thoughts were "Verify addresses? really? How do you do that?".I actually found the idea pretty amusing. Ignorance is bliss I guess.

As I started researching I realized that inaccurate addresses posed a big problem for businesses, especially those that rely on mailings for their sales. Companies that did not have an address verification solution in place were losing millions of dollars in postage, lost merchandise, lost invoices and all the additional time spent by employees in double checking all existing procedures to ensure accuracy. As a result this had opened up a big market for address verification software. A number of companies of varying sizes and shapes offer this software. My next task was to find the one that best suited us.

I poured over a number of "How To" guides on choosing address verification software and also spent a considerable amount of time reading the websites of the various companies suggested in those guides. Finally I narrowed down my choices to the following five companies: 

• MelissaData
• Intelligent Search Technology
• QAS
• USPS
• Sartoris Software  

I called each of these companies and spoke to their sales people. I noted down the various options provided by each and also the cost associated with each option. Most of the Companies except USPS offered two options:

• Hosting the software in-house
•  You get an installation CD that contains the API and all the addresses. You also get a list of updated addresses every two months  
• Accessing the software via web services 
• You pass the address to their web service that will perform the validation and return the results. This option was not offered by USPS. 
• This option is a lot cheaper compared to the first option.  

In the end we decided to go with the web services option provided by Intelligent Search Technology. They had a good API that satisfied our requirements and the cost was very affordable. Their web services were secure (https based) and used a 128 bit algorithm to encrypt the incoming and outgoing data. I created a proxy and tested their API quite extensively and so far the address verification has been pretty consistent and accurate.

Overall, It has been an amusing and enlightening experience and I hope this information proves useful to people out there looking for address verification software.

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