Our customers have asked us to extend our address search services to countries beyond Australia and New Zealand. Their customers are sometimes living overseas, and need to record home addresses in other countries. In addition, e-commerce stores want to allow shipping to selected overseas locations, and want to ensure that addresses are captured quickly and accurately.

Over the last few months, we have been working on adding this capability - and today we can report on our progress.

Autocomplete example showing Canadian addresses.

Initial launch countries

We have identified the following countries for initial launch for international address verifcation. These countries have been selected because they have a close connection with Australia and New Zealand.

• Canada
• Czechia
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• Portugal
• Singapore
• Spain
• Sweden
• United Kingdom
• United States

We intend to add new countries to this list every week.

Where does the data come from?

There are several different data sources available to us. For each country, we have identified the data set that has the highest quality for that location. For our initial launch countries, we are using data from either ESRI or HereMaps to support our international address verification. As we grow the number of supported countries, we may include data from additional suppliers.

How to use the service

The International Address APIs will look familiar to people who have used our Australian or New Zealand APIs. We are providing both an Address Autocomplete API and an Address Metadata API. These will work in a similar manner to the AU/NZ equivalents.

Consumers of the API will be able to access both address metadata, as well as GPS coordinates (if required). Here is an example of the International Address Metadata API response:

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{
  "address": {
    "id": "L/db_/V2f5FpvDTXGgGxrghWunrvQgG9ai/8TCDq0V8h4baeov2GWRWN7l/0SZuIce2wLdIcDbGeFiUtJ_l4oANZ--U38AK1qEG5qIli3X--Q8R6xhPKF_jaKRZhLY0FQw==",
    "full_address": "50 Brentwood Blvd, Strathcona County, AB T8A 2H5",
    "street_address": "50 Brentwood Blvd",
    "district": null,
    "town": "Strathcona County",
    "state": "AB",
    "postcode": "T8A 2H5",
    "latitude": 53.514499,
    "longitude": -113.296890
  },
  "success": true
}

Widget configuration

We will initially use the widget’s support for third party data sources. This will allow the familiar address select handlers to be used on existing web pages. We will share code examples that demonstrate how to configure the widget with the additional country support.

After launch, we intend to enhance the widget to make searching for many, many different countries a little easier.

Who has access

Any customer on a business plan will have access to the International Address APIs. Once launched, you will be able to consume these new APIs without having to make any plan changes.

The costs for using these APIs are the same as our local Address APIs. They are measured in the same manner, and you will consume a lookup for each address used.

Solution performance

Both the Autocomplete and Metadata APIs are quick. You should expect each response to take around 250 ms, so the user experience will be of a high standard.

Next steps and timeline

We expect to launch the service by the end of May. At that time, we will publish the code examples and give an update on the next countries that will be added.

We would love to hear from you about your specific needs. Especially, if you have some different countries that your business needs.

For early access, get in touch by contacting support@addressfinder.com.

Nigel Ramsay