Overview

This article will help to ensure your account is setup to the recommendations set forth by the Address Guard team, while also providing numerous links to helpful information for your account settings.

We highly recommend to watch the onboarding tutorial video to understand all aspects of your account:

Address Guard helps reduce costly undeliverable shipments caused by invalid addresses for online brands. An undeliverable shipment could be caused by a typo made by the customer (accidently entered the wrong house number, misspelled the street name, etc.), or by a specific shipping restriction such as PO Boxes or a non-contiguous state.

Address Guard checks each address for deliverability as well as additional, optional rulesets that you define. If an issue is found, we prompt the customer to fix the address. The process is entirely automated, helping your team to focus on other areas of your business.

Which countries are supported?

Address Guard validates address across 240+ countries by partnering with leading postal authorities and shipping carriers to ensure addresses are being checked against the most reliable reliable source.

Why should a business validate address data?

The shipping price associated with a package is just one aspect of the overall cost. An often overlooked item is the cost of failed deliveries, such as when an address is incorrect and the package is returned to the warehouse.

When this occurs the brand has to involve not just customer service to process the package but often logistics and finally handle the cost of any carrier fees associated with the redelivery. With UPS, FedEx and other popular shipping carriers charging fees between $15 - $35 per failed redelivery, it can become quite cost prohibitive for brands to ship products at scale, without harming profit margins.

The other direct result of a failed delivery is the customer satisfaction, as the customer will have to wait to be reshipped their order with the correct address.

Be sure to check out our ROI Calculator to get a better understanding of how much your business can save by validating order shipping addresses prior to shipment.

How Address Guard works as a platform

When Address Guard analyzes a shipping address, the validity of the data is checked in real-time to determine if the address is deliverable. We partner with leading shipping carriers and postal authorities to service 240+ countries & territories, helping to ensure address data is accurate prior to shipment.

The platform will automatically parse the address to check for typos, formatting issues and erroneous information. The system will attempt to correct the incorrect information and offer a suggestion to the customer. The customer can now accept the suggestion and Address Guard will update the order in your store with the updated shipping address.

If Address Guard determines that the address matches a rule that you have enabled, such as PO Box, we will prompt the customer and ask them to update their address. Click here to view all available address rules.

Likewise if the customer declines the suggestion, or prompt, we will automatically send them an email asking for them to make an update to ensure delivery. This is an effective follow up method helping the customer compete the update process.

Now that you have clear understanding of the platform, it's time to begin customizing settings to match your brand's design guidelines and shipping policies. We recommend to review the following guides: