What to Look For in an Address Autocomplete API
- Martha Howellweb
- Jul 4, 2023
- 2 min read
An address autocomplete API is a service that prepopulates online forms and checkout processes with verified address information. This reduces keystrokes and typos from user error, speeds up the checkout process and improves the overall customer experience.
It is essential to look for a solution that can offer real time verification and standardisation of addresses - regardless of country, language and formats. The best solutions will also align with the way users naturally search for addresses and have advanced fuzzy matching to capture accurate data even when there are typos or other errors. They should also have full Unicode support so that the user can search and see results in their native character set or language.
A good address search and autocomplete provider will also ensure that the suggestions they return are actually shipping or mailable addresses. If not then you could end up with customers that can’t sign up, receive your email newsletter or have their inflatable cat unicorn delivered to them. It is quite easy to test a providers ability to do this by creating a fake address (change the building number by one) and seeing if it returns as a suggestion for the same location.
It is also worth considering if your chosen API can complete the Secondary Address Unit Designators (i.e apartment numbers) of an address. Having this capability is important as over a quarter of addresses in the UK are multi-residential or buildings such as flats and apartments. It is important to test if the API you are looking at provides this level of detail as it will be a major differentiator from other providers that don’t.
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