Shippo Launches New Addresses API to Improve Parcel Delivery

There are now more than 165 million addresses in the U.S. alone. With this many places and people to possibly deliver to, having a proven and modern Addresses API can help make sure the right package gets sent to the right address while delivering a world-class shopping experience for customers.

That’s why we’re proud to announce our first standalone API service, Addresses API. With our address management solution, you can help avoid costly shipping surcharges, speed up your fulfillment process, improve your cart conversions, and elevate the customer experience without having to uproot your current tech stack. See how below!

Importance of Address Validation

Address validation can have a serious financial impact on your business’ top-line and bottom-line. We looked at our data to understand the impact of not validating addresses, and here is what we found.

Approximately 2.1% of packages come across address-related issues which can result in delays, lost packages, and even address correction surcharges. On top of that, non-validated addresses are 92% more likely to lead to delivery issues than validated addresses.

The amount that goes into having to replace numerous packages (order total value and shipping costs) can be very costly. And, on average, address correction surcharges due to address-related issues cost $4.64 per package. Put this number to scale and you can see how shipping 10,000+ orders a month could easily result in over $1,000 worth of unnecessary surcharges, hurting your bottom line.

This is not to mention the top-line impact of a customer having to wait more than expected to receive their order, as 85% of online shoppers would not shop with a retailer again after having a poor delivery experience. This makes it critical to validate addresses and ensure packages arrive to your customer at the right place and right time.

Parcel Delivery Improvements from Using Shippo’s Address Validation API

In a recent analysis, our Address Validation API demonstrated a staggering 93% reduction in package undeliverable issues for domestic shipments. The benefits of address validation are even more pronounced when considering different factors, such as shipping zones and states.

When packages are shipped to Zone 1, 2, and 4, the reductions in package undeliverable issues are a whopping 98%, 99%, and 96%, respectively.

Zooming in on states, our Address Validation API helps reduce package undeliverable issues substantially for Texas, New York, and California, to name a few. For packages shipped to Texas, our Address Validation API reduces package undeliverable issues by 95% while packages to New York see a 96% reduction in package undeliverable issues. As for California shipments, address validation reduces package undeliverable issues by 96%.

When it comes to shipments with certain carriers, our Address Validation API reduces address issues for UPS shipments by 84% and for FedEx shipments by 45%.

Looking at international shipments, our Address Validation API tremendously improves parcel delivery for packages being shipped to countries like Canada and Mexico. For packages being shipped to Canada, our address validation reduced package undeliverable issues by 80% and to Mexico by 61%.

Benefits Of Shippo’s Addresses API

There are three main features of this product, each with several benefits for your customers, fulfillment teams, and overall business.

Address Validation

With Shippo’s enhanced Address Validation API, you can quickly validate, standardize, and format addresses for your shipments. It essentially acts as an address checker API. Addresses within the U.S. and 50+ other countries can be validated to ensure you’re reaching the right address, whether domestically or internationally. You can also easily identify suggested changes and use our Confidence Score tool to accept or reject these suggestions. Most importantly, validation can either happen upstream during the customer checkout process or during rate calls. If addresses are validated upstream, this helps prevent errors during the rate call.

Digital Address Book

Our Address Book service is perfect for those frequently shipping to the same customer addresses and serves as an address lookup API. This service allows you to add, store, edit, and delete addresses in a recipient book. Our powerful search feature lets you quickly locate contacts and use stored addresses during label creation. You can also improve your customer’s experience by enabling them to save their addresses during checkout to reuse and expedite their future purchases.

Address Parsing

Our Address Parsing service allows you to quickly convert a single string of text into different address fields including street, city, phone number, and more, expediting your order fulfillment process. This can be used domestically and internationally for 200+ countries.

Overall, some of the biggest benefits of Shippo’s Addresses API are that it’s reliable, flexible, and easy to implement.

Who Can Use Shippo’s Newest Addresses API

Our Addresses API is designed so that anyone can benefit from using it. It can be built into one’s own applications – independent of what’s being used as their core label generation solution – or seamlessly integrated into Shippo’s core shipping API.

E-commerce businesses can easily use our Addresses API to speed up fulfillment times, reduce costly errors, and provide a better checkout experience for their customers. But, this product isn’t just limited to e-commerce segments. Businesses working in areas such as healthcare, retail fintech, real estate, government, and more can better equip their operations with the ability to validate addresses, easily parse them, and save them. Best of all, developers everywhere will love working with this product.

Get Started Quickly With a Developer-Friendly Product

This product was made with the developer in mind. We’ve made it easy for your developer team to get the Addresses API up and running as soon as possible.

Your team can also rest assured because our Addresses API is built on REST, OpenAPI v3, and is also GDPR and CCPA compliant. We also have industry-leading documentation so that implementation is a seamless experience.

Each of our address services uses a GET method endpoint, which results in fast response times and easy implementation. In the cases of an issue arising, we use machine and human-readable error messaging so that error messages are easy to understand and can be seamlessly identified.

We’ve also kept flexibility in mind. As mentioned earlier, Shippo’s Addresses API is a standalone product that can be built into your own applications so that you don’t have to overhaul your tech stack to get your addresses saved, parsed, and most importantly validated.

To learn more about our latest product, pricing, and how it can fit your business needs, reach out to one of our API experts today! Or, test drive the Addresses API with our demo and see what other shipping solutions we can provide your business by diving into our API docs here.