Good contact data is essential for any business, whether you use it to ship goods or services, send marketing messages, charge and collect payments or otherwise interact with your customers. But incorrect or incomplete addresses can cause a host of problems: returned mail, lost deliveries, missed opportunities to connect with people and grow your business, payment fraud scams and more. That's why it's important to have a robust address verification program that checks the data you collect against an up-to-date and accurate database of real-world addresses.
An address correction or validation API uses an Application Programming Interface (API) to look up the current formatted and verified version of an address against an official or authoritative list of addresses. This can correct a wide range of errors, from typos to casing to abbreviations. It can also add missing information if it is not in the original address, such as suite or apartment numbers. It can also enrich the output of an address with additional data points, such as congressional districts or FIPS codes.
In general, an address validation API will perform three key functions: cleansing, supplementation and standardization. Cleansing consists of removing duplicate address data and fixing erroneous data, such as spelling errors in street names or a house number being placed before or after the street name. Supplementation entails adding missing address components, such as postal codes. Standardization entails reordering the address components and ensuring that they match the rules of the postal authority (e.g., replacing common roadway identifiers like “street” and “parkway” with their standard abbreviations or confirming that the address is a residential, PO box or commercial address).
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