It’s important to perform FedEx address validation or UPS address validation before you ship your online orders. Ship an order with an incorrect address and you’ll fork over $17 per package, up to a maximum of $119 per shipment, in address correction fees. For most e-commerce merchants, verifying addresses before shipping can be the difference between making and losing money.

The best way for an e-commerce store to perform address validation is as seamlessly as possible. To avoid adding friction to the checkout process and driving up cart abandonment rates, an order’s address details should be verified after the order is placed. It is also the most economical way. You won’t be paying to validate an address every time someone enters the checkout process and then abandons the cart.

A subscription is valid for a month or a number of transactions, whichever comes first. Your subscription will renew automatically at the start of each monthly billing cycle, or when the number of transactions is fully depleted. The renewal process ensures that Validate-Addresses.com is always available to you.

Within a few seconds after you receive an order, Validate-Addresses.com performs the following actions:

1. Places the order on pending address validation hold. How this is done depends on your e-commerce platform and your settings.
2. Retrieves the order’s address details.
3. Performs the address verification. If it passes, Validate-Addresses.com communicates with your store and removes the pending address validation hold. You and your staff can now safely process the order.
4. If the address captured isn’t valid, the pending address validation hold remains. If the setting is enabled, a personalized email is automatically sent to the customer to request that the address be confirmed or corrected.

The mobile-friendly email your customer receives will present three options.

1. Accept a suggested alternate address.
2. Confirm the address as entered is correct.
3. Edit the originally entered address.

If the suggested alternate address is accepted, Validate-Addresses.com communicates with your store, corrects the address, and removes the pending address validation hold.

If the customer confirms that the address on the order is correct, the address validation error is overridden and Validate-Addresses.com communicates with your store and removes the pending address validation hold.

The option to edit the original address will deliver the customer to a webpage to use for that purpose. Validate-Addresses.com will validate the edited address and if it still doesn’t pass, it will continue to present the customer with options.

This process gives you the opportunity to avoid spending your time validating addresses. Still, there may be times when you want to intervene. You can log into Validate-Addresses.com anytime to manage individual orders with address issues.

Studies show that the average e-commerce store loses 75% to 85% of its sales to cart abandonment. There are many reasons for cart abandonment, but they all have one thing in common: friction. For this reason, coercing your customer to verify their address details or enter a correct address during checkout may not be the best solution.

Performing address verification during checkout interrupts your shopper at a crucial moment, right before the order is paid for. In many cases, there isn’t anything wrong with the address. A minor difference between the address entered and the address format the address validation software prefers will result in a prompt to confirm an address element. Many shoppers will find the interruption frustrating and abandon the cart, particularly if they’re in a hurry to get on to other things.

In 2018, Shopify - one of the leading e-commerce platforms - felt so strongly about minimizing friction in its checkout process that it changed its programming to prevent 3rd party app developers from modifying it. At the time there were a handful of apps that performed address validation for Shopify during the checkout process. They were popular apps among merchants on the Shopify Basic, Standard, and Advanced plans.

Shopify takes a 20% share of the revenue generated by 3rd party developed apps. Its willingness to forgo this revenue in favor of higher order conversion rates is telling. Today, if you want to use Shopify and perform address validation during the checkout process, you’ll need to dole out at least $2,000 per month to be on the Shopify Plus plan.

Validating addresses during the checkout process is also expensive because there’s a transactional cost to it. The difference in cost between validating address data before an order is placed and after an order is placed can be as much as your cart abandonment rate. With average cart abandonment rates between 75% and 85%, the difference in cost is significant.