Melissa IN Team | Address Autocomplete, India | address autocomplete, address verification, customer onboarding, ecommerce sites

Whether you sell everyday goods, luxury brands or niche art supplies, setting up an e-commerce website is no longer optional – it’s critical to your success. That said, simply having a website isn’t enough. Your website must be easy to navigate, let you onboard customers quickly and yet give you all the information needed to deliver the product to your customers. This is where having an address autocomplete function becomes useful.

You need an accurate address to be able to deliver your products to the customers. If the address is incomplete or wrong, your costs will increase as the delivery agent will charge you for a round trip, your customer will be dissatisfied and your brand reputation will suffer. Your only fault – you didn’t check the address. Checking every address manually is next to impossible but with address verification and autocomplete tools, the process becomes possible and much simpler. Here’s how.

1. It Makes The Onboarding Process Faster

The first time a customer places an order on your e-commerce website, they need to enter a number of personal details like their names, address and phone number. Some addresses can be quite long and entering them can be frustrating. It doesn’t help if the form has multiple address fields. According to a survey, 39% of all mobile users abandon their shopping carts because they find it difficult to enter their personal information.

With an address autocomplete tool, when the customer starts typing their address, the software automatically generates the rest of the address by referring to reliable third party databases. The customer can choose the accurate address from the list and have it automatically entered into the correct fields. As a result, the onboarding process is much faster and customers are happier.

2. It Reduces Manual Errors

Everyone can make mistakes. Typing the apartment number as 132 instead of 123 may seem like a small mistake but it means that their order cannot be delivered. If the customer realizes the mistake at the time of entering details, he has to retype the address. This may discourage him and make him abandon the cart. Similarly, let’s say the customer does not know their pin code and leaves the field blank. This again would make it harder for you to deliver their order. Another case – the city may change the name of a street but the customer may enter the old name.

An address autocomplete function reduces the chances of such errors. It ensures that addresses are entered correctly and completely. The autocomplete tool even takes into consideration updates to city addresses such as new street names and gives you the most up-to-date addresses. This ensures that your database stays clean.

3. It Minimizes Delivery Issues

One of the immediate effects of having incorrect and incomplete addresses in your database is that you face trouble making deliveries. Firstly, you cannot ensure that the customer’s address is reachable. This means that you may realize that the customer lives outside your delivery zone only much later – after he’s finished making payments. Most e-commerce websites do not charge a delivery fee or charge a minimal fee for this service. However, the actual delivery charge is usually higher. When you send out an order to the wrong address, the delivery agent will add a charge to your bill even though the order was not delivered. Once you get the correct address, the order will have to be resent. Thus, you will incur double delivery charges.

Using the address autocomplete tool helps ensure that orders are delivered correctly the first time around. Thus, you are saved from unnecessary costs. This, in turn, helps you maintain your budget and profit margins.

4. It Protects You From Fraud

While some customers make unintentional errors while entering their personal details, cybercriminals intentionally enter wrong details while creating accounts so as to impersonate others. If they succeed in doing this, they may use your website to steal an innocent person’s identity and commit fraud. This results in losses for you and damages your reputation. But, if you were to verify and validate addresses before entering them into your system, you could protect the company and your customers from such types of fraud.

A Final Word

In today’s world where building an e-commerce website is quick and easy, the competition is constantly growing. Fighting the competition by lowering price points is not sustainable in the long run. Even the most unique product you manufacture will be copied in time. Thus, if you want your customers to stay loyal to you, you need to offer them the best customer experience. By using an address autocomplete tool, you can make the process quicker; reduce the effort required from the customer and get accurate, reliable information for your database. It’s a win-win situation for everyone!