Boost e-commerce conversion with free UK address look-ups from postcode

Boost e-commerce conversion with free UK address look-ups from postcode

I'm sure you've used websites where you can simply type in your postcode and it will return a short list of addresses of which yours will be listed to save you time inputting it. This is extremely attractive to Internet retailers who are looking for every possible opportunity to increase conversion by making their websites faster and easier to use. But how is this done? Is there a database available? Is it free?

There is a database available from the Royal Mail called PAF (Postcode Address File). It is a list of every residential and business address in the United Kingdom with postcodes. The problem is that this database is extremely expensive. It is completely prohibitive to small companies. However there are Independent services that pay this large fee themselves as a service and provide an API and charge look-ups by usage. Have a quick Google around and you will find quite a few. Typical costs are about 0.05 per search which potentially outweighs its costs if it does indeed boost your conversion rates and sales.

There was a lot of hype in 2010 as the UK government promised to open up a lot of data to the population for free. The postcode database was of particular interest to Internet retailers for the reasons given above. The database released through the Ordnance Survey's OpenData scheme and it did contain every one of the 1.7 million UK postcodes but only linked them to latitude and longitude values. This allowed people to now be able to measure the distance between two postcodes very accurately for free but it didn't provide address data.

Finally, there is now an alternative which is a very good compromise. There are other databases that aren't quite so accurate as the Royal Mail's PAF but will give full house name, street name, town, county data for free through an API. It's called tabcat and it provides free address look-ups from UK postcodes.

The best way to explain its operation is to simply go to the website and try it out! It's completely free for Internet retailers to use on their own websites as long as the service origin is acknowledged with a link to tabcat somewhere.

How does it work? There is a fully functional integration example which is based on jQuery but essentially you call an API located on tabcat's servers passing a house number and a UK postcode and it will return all possible results in JSON format. tabcat will also return the results in XML if desired but the JSON one is recommended due to jQuery's ability to process it easily as you will notice in the source code.

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