Retailers and brands realize reduced shipping costs, savings through delivery indicator (more accurate, efficient shipping), reduced address correction fees charged by carriers, and increased operational efficiency with no manual verification.
Where data accuracy drives your success.
Back to the Basics:
What’s in an Address?
In theory, knowing “the particulars of the place where someone lives or an organization is situated” seems simple enough, but for global retailers that are trying to get the right products to the right places at the right time, it can be more daunting than it sounds.
That’s because with the sheer growth of e-commerce and the ‘need-it-now’ expectations driven by big-box retailers like Amazon or Walmart, free and fast shipping are the new norm, even driving shoppers’ purchasing decisions. In fact, over 33% of the world’s population is shopping online, and e-commerce is now a $6.8 trillion industry (estimated to reach the $8 trillion mark by 2027).3
For starters, businesses have to take into account the many components of a mailing address. It can include, for example, the primary address number, predirectional, street name, suffix, postdirectional, secondary address identifier, and secondary address (see Figure 1).
Additionally, there are extensive address formats, different postal requirements, and formats for various countries with localization for cross-border logistics. Retailers and brands must even deal with character length standards, for example.
What’s more, knowing the proper structure of an address (or if it even exists) is different for Germany versus the US versus Canada, etc.
Consider US conversions for international addresses:
Finally, there are also other Global Address Elements to consider:
Example of UK address
For retailers and brands doing business around the world, undeliverable shipments to a bad address are a costly concern that leads to frustrated consumers.
However, shipping-related reasons contribute to over 60% of carts being abandoned.4
Roadblocks to Watch:
What is a Bad Address?
Reports estimate that 20% of postal addresses entered online contain errors. This includes everything from spelling mistakes to wrong house numbers, incorrect postal codes, and formatting errors that don’t comply with a country’s postal regulations.
This can result in late or undeliverable shipments, a big and costly concern for companies doing business domestically and across the globe.
In fact, businesses lose, on average, $9.7 million each year due to poor quality data, and workers waste 50% of their time hunting for data, correcting errors, and confirming sources for uncertain data.5
And, within an address, there are plenty of roadblocks to watch out for that can hinder success:
Missing street name, directional, or postal code.
In sum, retailers need to determine whether an address actually exists, and/or whether deliveries can be accepted there, but don’t always have a way to do so.
The Cost of a Bad Address:
What’s the Impact?
Lost sales and abandoned shopping carts cost the e-commerce industry $18 billion every year, with an average cart abandonment rate of 70%. This means that regardless of the size of your business, “it cuts into the bottom line significantly.”6
Why are consumers leaving their goods on the table? According to one study, 22% of US online shoppers abandoned their orders because of a long or complicated checkout process.7
For every 10 consumers who express enough interest in products to place them in their online shopping carts, 7 leave websites without buying the items … This represents billions of dollars in missed retail sales opportunities each year for e-commerce businesses.7
While it is hard to pinpoint the exact point of abandonment, complicated or long checkout processes, including excessive forms, lead to frustration. And the mobile experience can be even more tedious:
of respondents complain that ordering on a mobile device is more difficult.
Finally, other costs are not as easily quantifiable, but impactful enough to mention, including refunding delivery charges to the consumers and paying for redelivery or offering consumers discounts.
However, recovering this lost revenue is not out of reach for retailers and brands.
Taking Action:
How to Correct Bad Addresses
Taking the necessary steps through address verification and validation service to correct bad addresses means cost savings for retailers and brands. Click on each stage below to see how it works.
Field and Detect
Global Address Complete — auto-filling accurate address information — can decrease cart abandonment by up to 20%. It reduces form fields for a smoother checkout process leading to increased sales and more satisfied consumers.10
.
Use Cases:
5 Benefits to Address Verification
Once the systems and tools are in place for address verification, retailers and brands can take advantage of many business benefits including (but not limited to):
Chargeback fees cost between $20 and $100, depending on the merchant's agreement with their acquirer. When you add these fees up with all the other hidden and indirect costs, companies often lose more than twice the transaction amount for each chargeback.
Accurate and verified addresses mean more accurate deliveries and faster delivery times leading to more satisfied consumers. Right product, right time also means lower return costs for retailers and brands.
Processing orders as fast as possible by verifying a consumer’s accurate billing address before sending it to your card processor reduces errors and adds to a better consumer experience.
Retailers with a single consumer view based on clean, deduplicated address data can quickly identify a purchase that doesn’t align with a consumer's previous buying habits. The data can immediately be flagged without the need to invest in robust and expensive identity verification, while also eliminating the need for manual reviews. This means reduced chargebacks and a lower risk of fraud.
Faster checkouts means happier consumers and reduced cart abandonment. In addition to improved consumer service, consider the ROI of getting same-day delivery right:11
Address Verification in Action: Jerry’s Artarama
How do you make e-commerce address verification a fine art? Ask Jerry’s Artarama. The company implemented Melissa tools to validate customer contact data, keep that data safe from fraud, and make shipping and fulfillment faster and easier.
Types of Address Tools Available:
Tech Toolkit
Choose a solutions partner that works with postal authorities (i.e., USPS) to consistently acquire the most accurate address data. Other unique company benefits should include:
Deliver on
Consumer Expectations
With Melissa
In a world driven by data, accuracy is more than important—it’s everything.
For 40 years, Melissa has pioneered solutions that turn flawed data into actionable insights. Starting with the creation of ZIP+4 to becoming global leaders in Data Quality, Address Verification, and identity resolution, Melissa empowers over 10,000 businesses to unlock a 360-degree view of their customers.
1 trillion+ records processed—refining addresses, emails, names, and phones to perfection.
in Ease of Doing Business With
Street Range
Dependent Thoroughfare
1. Reduced Shipping Errors and Delays.
2. Reduced Processing Errors.
3. Better Fraud Prevention.
4. Improved Consumer Service.
5. Cost Savings.
Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents say their revenues rose by 6% or more when they added same-day service, while 30% saw an increase of more than 10%.
For example, the data would give retailers the ability to quickly identify if the IP address or GPS of the ordering device doesn’t match the known location of the cardholder—these can be flagged as potential fraud.
Field and Detect
Take structured or unstructured input, separate noise, detect county, and format address for parsing. When capturing the address, systems can autocomplete and/or verify a postal address at the point of entry, so bad data never enters your system.
Address Parse
Parse elements such as “Ave.” and “Strasse” and prepare the input for standardization. Systems can use proprietary lexicons and rules to parse an address into its component parts.
Standardize
Utilize address format definitions for standardizing input based on reference address formats (usually conforms an address to USPS address validation standards or local country format).
Verify/Correct
This step is the most critical. Apply reference data sources (authoritative postal data) to correct and verify results.
Transliterate
Use reference data translations and transliteration technology to return values in the correct alphabet.
Format and Return
Correctly format and address—a clean, deliverable postal address checked and ready for mailing, order fulfilment, or analytics—for return to the calling application.
Address Parse
Standardize
Verify/CorrecT
Transliterate
Format and Return
Typos or false information.
Not standardized to match the format for the relevant postal authority.
The address could be a real place, but the postal authority doesn’t recognize it as a valid, deliverable location. Many rural residences have street addresses, but are serviced by the United States Postal Service (USPS) P.O. boxes, so they don’t exist in the USPS database.
New construction means an address may not yet be registered with the USPS, or the address is marked vacant by the USPS.
The address may be destroyed or demolished.
Not technically a bad address per se, but it raises costs and prevents a single customer view. For example, Customer A has a record in the database with an address 123 N Elm St #8, but they also have accounts under 123 Elm St 8 and 123 Elm St Unit 8.
Contains multiple address fields, unstructured big data, and/or different abbreviations, diacritics, and language sets.
Losing revenue from cart abandonment is not the only problem. Delivery failures also cost businesses money in fees:9
of first-time deliveries fail, costing retailers an average of $17.20 per order, and the reliance is on the carrier to correct the address
Did You Know?
What to Look for in a Provider
Single Address Lookup • Batch • Real-time • Address Autocompletion • NCOA / Move Update
Melissa Global Data Coverage
Impact:
Recognized by G2 as leaders in both Data Quality and Global Address Verification.
Trusted by businesses worldwide to eliminate costly errors, boost efficiency, and drive growth.
According to the 2025 G2 Grid Report, Melissa scored:
in Meets Requirements
in Quality of Support
in Ease of Setup
in Ease of Admin
97%
92%
90%
96%
97%
See Melissa in Action
Incomplete
INCORRECT
IMPROPER FORMAT
INVALID
UNREGISTERED OR VACANT
OUTDATED OR NONEXISTENT
DUPLICATED
UNSTANDARDIZED
of survey respondents saw higher revenue per order after implementing same-day delivery, with 34% experiencing a surge of between 6% and 10%.
of firms that track same-day delivery ROI realize consistent improvement across those metrics every year. That growth helps keep the costs of same-day delivery in check over time.
2/3rds
80%
68%
INPUT INDEX
CANDIDATE
INDEX
DELIVERY POINT
BARCODE
DELIVERY LINE 1
DELIVERY LINE 2
LAST LINE
ADDRESSEE
PRIMARY NUMBER
STREET NAME
STREET PREDIRECTIONAL
STREET POSTDIRECTIONAL
STREET SUFFIX
SECONDARY NUMBER
SECONDARY DESIGNATOR
DELIVERY POINT CHECK DIGIT
CITY
STATE
ZIP CODE
ZIP+4 CODE
DELIVERY POINT
PMB DESIGNATOR
PMB NUMBER
URBANIZATION
COUNTY FIPS
COUNTY NAME
COUNTY ROUTE
RDI
LATITUDE
LONGITUDE
BUILDING DEFAULT INDICATOR
CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT
UTC OFFSET
OBSERVES DST
PRECISION
TIME ZONE
CMRA
EWS MATCH
DPV MATCH CODE
DPT FOOTNOTES
ACTIVE
VACANT
FOOTNOTES
LACSLINK CODE
LACSLINK INDICATOR
of businesses admit that poor physical address data causes problems.
Complexity often begins at the address entry stage:8
UPS up to $23.50 per package
FedEx up to $24 per package
Plus on-time delivery guarantee may be voided
have abandoned a purchase in the past 3 months because they struggled to enter their address or got fed up with the checkout process.
of e-commerce co's either don't verify addresses or leave it up to the courier.
of deliveries are delayed, and 39% simply fail when addresses are inaccurate or incomplete.
38%
27%
41%
33%
41%
8%
Premise Number
Street Name
Thoroughfare
Suite
Sub Premises
City
Locality/Settlement
State
Administrative Area
Zip +4 Code
Postal Code
County Code
Sub-Administrative Area
Dependent Locality
Double Dependent Locality
Building
A cross street used to break ties
A smaller area designator to break city ties
An even smaller area designator to break ties
Name identifier for a structure
What Are Chargebacks?
The one thing that has remained pervasively analog for many e-commerce companies is shipping. If the shipping or billing addresses are not accurate, even by just a small bit, products might not arrive, leading to a poor consumer experience.
In 2016, the technologically fortified Jerry’s site enjoyed a 30% reduction in ordering mistakes, Marchetta says. With both reduced returns and foiled fraudulent orders, significant savings in shipping cost-backs and penalties have been realized. And consumer satisfaction and retention mean repeat business, and more cross- and up-sell opportunities.
“Shipping can definitely be a pain point with e-commerce and mail orders, and problems here can really impact customer retention,” says Michael Marchetta, director of marketing operations at Jerry’s Artarama, a Raleigh, N.C.-based supplier of art painting supplies like brushes, paints, easels and drawing materials.
With 16 physical locations in the US and a substantial ordering business, Jerry’s is a mainstay supplier for art schools, individual artists, and hobbyists who want professional equipment.
As with any ordering process, address verification has been a traditional challenge for Jerry’s, Marchetta says. Online customers might mistype their addresses or provide slightly off destinations during phone orders. Business addresses are usually treated differently from residences for delivery purposes, and misidentifying one for the other can cause lost packages and incorrect shipping charges.
It’s bad enough when customers’ patience is stretched to the breaking point because of lost or inordinately delayed orders. Equally painful to any supplier are credit card chargebacks, charges to cover return costs, and additional penalties.
Marchetta decided that more technological innovation was called for, using software tools from data quality software and address verification provider Melissa, to help when “it absolutely, positively has to be there.” Jerry’s Artarama also leverages:
Melissa for validating phone orders.
Cloud-based Personator, both to validate contact information and to update addresses for customers who have moved.
Personator also verifies the customer’s entire record, matching a particular name to an accurate email address, phone, and physical address, while adding geographic and demographic data for better segmentation and targeting by the marketing team.
The process calculates the shopper’s precise distance from distribution points, enabling quick calculation of shipping costs at several price levels, depending on how fast the consumer wants delivery.
The Magento plug-in adds missing components such as region or postal codes. It’s estimated that the automated process cuts data entry keystrokes in half, thus speeding up checkout and reducing shopping-cart abandonment.
To fit in with its global expansion plans, Jerry’s Artarama uses Melissa’s Global Address Verification cloud service that parses locations in some 240 countries. Jerry’s now has address verification technology that covers much of the globe.
With Melissa tools, Jerry’s now has the capability of determining in real time if a consumer is who he says he is in order to combat fraud. The tool cross-validates shipping and billing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and even IP geolocation.
“Over time, the benefits, savings, and enhanced revenue are going to get better and better,” he said. You might say that Jerry’s Artarama is getting things down to both a fine art and a fine science.
Highest Accuracy & Coverage – 240+ Countries & Territories
USPS® CASS™ & Canada Post SERP Certified Address Software
Batch Processing, API integration & Global Service Bureau
Highly Scalable + Integrations for Leading GIS, CRM & Ecommerce Apps
SOC 2 Certified, GDPR & HIPAA Compliant for Data Security & Privacy
CASE STUDY
THE CHALLENGE
THE SOLUTION
THE RESULTS
Figure 1. U.S. Address Elements
Or the transaction might originate in a disallowed or suspect country (i.e. if a country is on a sanctions list that prevents items from being shipped) — the retailer can automatically deny transactions for certain locations, for instance. Both of these use cases help identify potential fraud, resulting in reduced chargebacks.
Better Fraud Protection
SEE EXAMPLE
1 MIT Professional Education, “Why 95% of new products miss the mark (and how yours can avoid the same fate)” 2 Rasha Mahmoud, “Number of Retail Stores in The U.S.”, Retail Dogma
3 SellersCommerce, “51 eCommerce Statistics In 2025 (Global and U.S. Data)” 4 Moosend, “20+ Cart Abandonment Stats To Reduce Your Lost Sales In 2025”
5 Retail TouchPoints, “Bad Data Costs Businesses $9.7 Million Annually”
6 Fyresite, “Abandoned Carts Costing $$$? Here’s How To Rescue Lost Revenue” 7 NetSuite, “What Is Cart Abandonment? How to Prevent It” 8 Loqate, “Fixing Failed Deliveries”
9 Enterprise Times, “Research reveals the cost of failed deliveries”
10 Service Objects, "Reduce Cart Abandonment by 20% with Global Address Complete"
11 Roadie, “What kind of ROI can you expect from same-day delivery?”
Retailers that use geocoding or reverse geocoding have the opportunity to fix ambiguous addresses, which improves fulfillment and keeps customers coming back time and time again. Retailers should leverage a partner that utilizes a Coding Accuracy Support System (CASS)-certified address verification solution for US addresses. That’s because CASS-certified providers need to pass regular tests with a 98.5 match/verification rate. .
Best Practice Bonus
The CASS-certification program was developed by the USPS to test the accuracy of address-matching software and improve the accuracy of postal coding, such as ZIP+4 Code® and five-digit ZIP Code coding.
For global address verification, choose a provider that is certified or partners with the postal authority in which the retailer does business. For example, in Canada, Canada Post SERP; in Germany, Deutsche Post; and in the United Kingdom, Royal Mail.
BEST PRACTICE BONUS
Sources:
World Encyclopedia of Address Formats
ROI Calculator
Over 240 address formats across the globe to help you mail with accuracy, confidence and local know-how.
A Web Map Application reveals various data sets, procured by Melissa, and their coverage by country at a global scale.
See how much bad data is costing you, and what your annual savings could be.
What is your average customer order value?*
0
Calculate Cost of Bad Data
DOWNLOAD THE CASE STUDY
Retailers have to compete with nearly 30,000 new products introduced each year1 and around 1 million stores just in the US alone.2
What’s more, the economic climate consists of everything from lingering inflation impacts to leftover pandemic supply chain hiccups, leaving consumers to hang onto their wallets tightly. Chasing more value for their dollars means loyalty is no longer guaranteed, as consumers are not afraid to switch brands without a second thought as they chase the right deals.
So, how can retailers and brands stand out from the crowd while increasing conversions and building consumer loyalty?
Dive into the details and find out why success starts with the right address
How retail success starts with the right address
Delivering at the Speed of Consumer Demand
Retailers have to compete with nearly 30,000 new products introduced each year1 and around 1 million stores just in the US alone.2
What’s more, the economic climate consists of everything from lingering inflation impacts to leftover pandemic supply chain hiccups, leaving consumers to hang onto their wallets tightly. Chasing more value for their dollars means loyalty is no longer guaranteed, as consumers are not afraid to switch brands without a second thought as they chase the right deals.
So, how can retailers and brands stand out from the crowd while increasing conversions and building consumer loyalty?
How retail success starts with the right address
Delivering at the Speed of Consumer Demand