Running an efficient e-commerce website involves many moving parts and relies on accuracy to improve customer experience and drive conversions. Managing hundreds, if not thousands of shipping addresses can mean an increased risk of user error, and this can cost your business valuable revenue. A frequent issue faced by many e-commerce sites is incorrect or incomplete addresses entered during the checkout process. This results in packages being delivered to the wrong address or returned to the sender, unhappy customers and unnecessary overheads. After all, someone has to pay to have wrongly addressed packages rerouted. For example, with FedEx Express, if an incomplete or incorrect recipient address has been provided, FedEx may attempt to find the correct address and complete the delivery. Using the address included in the shipper’s electronic shipment information to determine whether an address correction is necessary, FedEx estimates a shipping fee priced at $17 per package for the correction.
Errors like these can run up your costs significantly, so the question is, how can this risk be mitigated? Address Validation for e-commerce sites is a particularly effective tool that helps to reduce user error and time and money spent in attempting to correct mistakes. Address Validation is a service that checks if the address entered by a customer is a valid one in Google’s address database.
For websites running on NetSuite commerce platform, Address Validation can be added as an extension for SuiteCommerce Advanced Aconcagua or later versions. For earlier versions of Suitecommerce Advanced, Address Validation can be added as a customization.
What are the benefits of Address Validation?
- Simplified checkout process: A shorter checkout cycle is more likely to lead to a sale. Online shoppers tend to be averse to spending an inordinate amount of time on a checkout page, and a tedious process can often lead to frustration and cart abandonment. It is in every online business’s best interest to ensure that their checkout process is simple and streamlined, and one way to do so is through address auto-completion. As soon as the customer types in enough qualifying information in the shipping address, the Address Validation service suggests matching validated addresses. One of the most popular auto-complete tools available on the market is the Google Places API Autocomplete. This API makes the process of finding addresses a lot easier by automatically geolocating the customer’s location using their IP address and suggesting an address relevant to their region.
- Error-free address entry: For accurate and speedy deliveries, Address Validation ensures that addresses are free of typos and formatted in the expected way for the destination. This is especially important for businesses that ship from offshore locations and need to format addresses in many different ways. The Address Validation API checks for misspellings, spaces, and capitalizations.
- Lead generation: With simpler forms and more customers filling them out, data collection is simpler, accurate and more efficient, increasing lead generation, and as a result, sales.
Does your ec-ommerce website need help in increasing conversions and creating an overall smoother customer experience? Address Validation for SuiteCommerce can help. Schedule a consultation with Tvarana’s team of NetSuite experts to get started!
