How are "care of" addresses formatted?

Question

I have a question about how Smarty Streets is formatting an address. If I am entering a care of address, the address verification is formatting the address by putting the c/o name in between the street address and the city/state/ZIP Code.

Please advise on how this can be corrected.

Answer

Great question. Our system provides address validation, and our core data comes from the US Postal Service. Since "care of" information isn’t pertinent to address validation (it's important but not necessary for determining whether the address is mailable), it’s moved to the address line 2 field. This will always be the case. Any time you submit information in address1 or address2, only the valid address delivery data will be used in address1.

"Care of" is treated in the same way as any other extra data would be. If you were to submit an address like this:

address1: leave packages behind bushes on the left
address2: 1402 West Center St
city: orem
state: ut
zip: 84057

The extra data would be preserved but shifted down to the address2 field, which is where it belongs. In fact, the USPS prefers that the ATTN line or c/o information to be on line 4 or 5 (after the last line, which has city/state/ZIP), but that looks awkward.

The best way to handle that might be to have an additional field where your customer can enter specific delivery instructions, or even use an Addressee field.