Brick Owl: please check UK postal codes

Leftoverbricks

It would be nice if BO could check if the postal code entered by the buyer is correct. I know there are API's for this which can easily be implemented when a buyer enters his/hers postal code. So please use a API to check & validate before you accept the user input on the postal code input field.

Why? Not for the first time I had an order where the buyer supplied an incorrect PC. I had to use google maps to look for addresses in the neighbourhood if it was correct or not.

Postal codes in the United Kingdom (as well as Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia) all use a combination of 6 or 7 numbers and letters, but sometimes it is 3+3 or 3+4 or 4+3 divided by a space. The place of the space is VERY important, otherwise Postnl - who does do a check! - will not accept it.

In this case it turned out that the buyer used:
LNN space LN space LN
instead of LNN space LNLN
where L is a letter and N is a number.

Thank you implementing this.

Mrs Swoop

Sound like a good idea, although I'm guessing there's a cost involved.

BTW, for UK addresses the Royal Mail address finder might be easier to use than google maps - https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode.

Bricks-Shop

If this would be implemented for UK, please implement it also for Germany.
There are so many people which are not able to enter their correct addresses: wrong ZIP, Missing House Number (mandatory in Germany), Street with number split into two lines Street and Street 2.

brickadoon

We check the address on Royal Mail postcode finder for all orders, and it's found a few 'errors'.

We also check non-UK addresses with the local postal provider if they have a similar tool.

It adds a few extra seconds when packaging an order, but we think it's worth it in the long run as it's very rare we have an order go missing in the post.

Hoddie

Be careful with validating addresses online - there are sometimes political and cultural reasons for a buyer using an address that would not normally be validated.

For example, some towns here in Belgium have different names depending on the language spoken by the buyer, but the national carrier only validates the version that is correct to the language of the region.

Same is true for much of the former Yugoslavia, some parts of England, Northern Ireland, former USSR states, etc., etc. - so while the national carrier may prefer it one way and their validation tools will steer you that way, they will always accept common alternatives even it means having to manually sort them. But from a seller's point of view it may be preferable to annoy the carrier than the buyer!

Leftoverbricks

So this is not solved by Brick Owl while every other e-commerce site is using this? Can't comprehend, sorry. We're not talking about former Yugoslavia - there are next to zero orders from those countries - but about the UK where 90% of all orders come from.

Jay37

@Mrs Swoop Yes, I believe there is a cost involved and probably a fairly sizeable one. In a previous job working in a non-profit organisation we considered it but decided it was too expensive at the time. Only when we switched to a more integrated system was it available, but again it was an expensive add-on and not a default function.

antant7

Searching for uk postcode regex, returns a stack overflow result with this in the accepted answer:

The RegEx supplied by the UK Government was:

([Gg][Ii][Rr] 0[Aa]{2})|((([A-Za-z][0-9]{1,2})|(([A-Za-z][A-Ha-hJ-Yj-y][0-9]{1,2})|(([A-Za-z][0-9][A-Za-z])|([A-Za-z][A-Ha-hJ-Yj-y][0-9][A-Za-z]?))))\s?[0-9][A-Za-z]{2})

It won't do any address matching but it would filter out most invalid postcodes. I remember using such a simple solution in a past life, until the bosses decided that validating the full address was important enough to shell out the cash for the full address database CD (!!!).