FedEx / USPS / UPS Frontend Address Verification

Ever had a customer enter an invalid address?

Have you ever found out that your shipping provider can’t ship to an address after an order has been made?

Have you ever wondered if an address is eligible for commercial shipping rates?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could verify the validity of an address before an order is completed?

We have just finished creating a set of front-end modules that will verify the shipping address of a customer during the checkout process, forcing the user to use a valid address before completing the checkout process. If you utilize FedEx, UPS or USPS for your shipping this module will utilize their API services to validate the shipping address entered by the customer, forcing the user to correct any address issues before continuing forward with their order. What is also great about this module is aside from determining the validity of an address the module will also store the “type” of address to the database. This is helpful when submitting addresses to the shipping providers because you can specify whether or not an address is commercial or residential.

So on top of building this module into the checkout process we have included some tools for any developers out there. These modules are actually accessible anywhere within the cart (code wise anyhow) to call up functions to check the validity of addresses with 3 different shipping APIs. We have build classes that integrate perfectly into ISC so you basically pass in an address ID or you can pass in the physical address and the module will return a value of valid or invalid as well as the type of address, which is either commercial / business or residential. These values are then saved into the database and can easily be returned by a query or again utilizing the classes built for either of the three shipping providers. A lot of clients utilize 3rd party fulfillment services where order information is submitted through an API to the fulfillment center. When these orders are sent I have seen to many customers simply defaulting the address type as residential. Now you can verify the type of address and save that extra few dollars by defining the address type as commercial if it is indeed a commercial address.

The whole point of this module is to alleviate the need to go back to the customer and request a valid address because of a typo. This system also guarantees that the shipping provider being utilized can ship to the address of the customer. As an added bonus the address type is saved so that shippers can minimize their expenses when shipping to commercial addresses.