Full Address Validation Leads to Better Business Data Certain surprises are fun. Finding out the person in front of you at Starbucks paid for your coffee? Java-tastic! Finding out you've been shipping products to addresses that don't exist? That's a postal catastrophe. Luckily, many shipping snafus can be prevented by using address validation software. Address validation (or verification) is the process of checking a mailing address against an authoritative address database. If the address matches an address in the known database, it is marked “valid”—meaning it's real.

There are many problems you may run into if you're working with address data. In our recent webinar, our own Adam Charlton went over some of the challenges he's encountered the most, and how to deal with them. Here’s some of what he talked about. You can view the full recording at the link below. Standardization Standardizing addresses helps solve many of the problems inherent with data blending (combining two or more address databases together). In order to properly blend different address databases together you need to either have an external ID correlate the two sources, or have identically formatted address fields.