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Anyone who has ever registered their name and address on the web will doubtless have experienced the good and the bad sides of online address capture. Good are those sites that ask you for a minimum of information, such as the house number and postcode for a UK address, and then use this to look up your address on the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF).

Bad are those that ask you for information that it is impossible to provide, but will not let you proceed any further until you do so.

With 25 different writing systems and around 200 written languages in use around the world, any website that wants to capture name and address details of consumers outside its native country needs to have a system in place to do so. So with the web and ecommerce now part of everyday life for millions of people, how well are online address capture and address management solutions coping? And how can you ensure you get it right?

Pitfalls of address management

According to Stuart Carnegie, product group manager at Quick Address Systems (QAS), there are a variety of ways in which an online address management solution can fall down. First there is what he calls the "schoolboy error" of making some information mandatory, even when it is data that some users cannot provide. Then there are the cultural issues. Most UK consumers will be willing and able to enter their house number and postcode on a website to have the address returned by an online address management solution. In the US, however, many Americans do not know their equivalent 'Zip + 4' code, so the obvious alternative is to ask them for their house number, street name and zip code. But, says Carnegie, many simply do not like entering addresses in this way, so instead, QAS asks them to fill in their entire address.

Finally, Carnegie says, many solutions that can cater for different address formats fall down by providing an unsatisfactory user experience. He cites solutions where the consumer is asked only for their postcode, and then has to scroll through a list of house numbers, rather than simply entering the number along with the postcode.

Address management company Global Address designed its Global Address Web solution specifically for international address capture, rather than spinning it out of a domestic solution designed for one-country use.

"When you're dealing with 100 languages and 220-plus countries, tinkering with an existing product to cope with all the different data sets and address formats will never be totally successful," says chief executive Martin Turvey.

To cope with different address formats, Global Address Web allows users to enter address data in a format they are familiar with, such as house number, street, county, or postcode. The software takes care of the variations from country to country. When this has been entered, it goes through a verification process to ensure data accuracy. Finally, the software takes the address data, and formats the components correctly for each country.

The third-party datasets used by Global Address and others are key to the success or otherwise of an international address management solution.

As David Green, head of marketing at GB Group, which uses Global Address Web as part of its own international address data solution, points out: "In the UK, we have the PAF, which is the base for global addressing standards. But other countries haven't placed the same sort of emphasis on addressing standards and haven't understood the need for it in an online environment, so additional sources of data are an important factor for data accuracy."

For its European datasets, address management company Capscan works with the European address solutions company Uniserv. Capscan's international address management solution, Matchcode International, covers 20 countries, including the UK, the US, mainland Europe and Scandinavia, and uses the additional national datasets to supplement the postal address file from the country in question. Capscan international solutions sales manager Jonathan Paterson says these additional datasets play a big part in ensuring the accuracy and quality of the solution.

"If you take Italy as an example, the Post Italiana data has around 70,000 street names for 28 major towns. We have credit checking and third-party data that has 1.5 million street names, which gives us much better coverage and therefore much more accuracy."

"For non-UK addresses, it's more a question of data validation rather than rapid data entry," agrees Guy Mucklow, managing director of address management firm Postcodeanywhere. "There's great awareness of our own address data in the UK that you just don't get that in other countries."

Postcodeanywhere's customers receive a monthly PAF update by default.

For international addresses, it works with global address management company Address Doctor. International addresses are updated as frequently as the local address data suppliers, who supply the PAF equivalent, update their files.

Online international address management has come a long way since this type of solution became widely available. But if you're only trying to attract customers from your own country, do you need a solution that can cope with all-comers? The jury on this one is out.

"Companies have to accept that the day their website goes live, they have an international audience," says Carnegie. However, Neville Hilton, business director at address management company AFD Software, believes the issue may be overblown.

"If international address capture is important to you, then you should have a system in place to handle it," he says. "But for many companies that are only interested in attracting customers from their own country, it's not. Even with a good address management solution in place, there are other things to consider, not least of which is how culturally relevant your site is in each territory."

In any case, with all the options on offer, it's clear that an international address management solution does not have to break the bank.

ZIPPY ADDRESSING

Carrier Direct Marketing is a marketing support service company with a call centre and mailing house in Barnstaple, Devon. It handles tourist enquiries for several UK tourist boards, including North Devon and Cumbria.

Many of these enquiries come from the US, so to ensure brochure requests are correctly fulfilled, Carrier uses Postcodeanywhere's US Addressing address management solution. This has block level detail on 120 million US addresses, so when a US caller requests a brochure, the only information the agent needs is their five-digit zipcode and street name.

From this, the software can return all the house numbers on that street.

All the caller needs to do then is to give the agent their house number and the address fields are completed, including the caller's full 'Zip +4' zipcode, town and state, enabling the brochure to be dispatched.