Address Formatting for International Mailing?

linuxbaby asks: "Anyone have any advice or wisdom from experience about address formatting for international shipping? I'm starting to doubt the process of asking individual questions of 'name, company, address, city, state, postalcode, country' because of complaints or misunderstandings from places like Ireland (no postalcodes), Germany (postalcode goes before city), Japan and England (many lines of address info needed). Maybe the best approach is to just get the country as a option-select list of 2-character country codes, but leave the other lines wide open ('address1', 'address2', 'address3', 'address4') for the person to fill in as they see fit. The point here is not data mining, but shipping packages as accurately as possible, anywhere in the world. Thoughts?"

Comments

Effective Addressing for International Mail

[TRS-80]

FRANK'S COMPULSIVE GUIDE TO POSTAL ADDRESSES is probably the best resource you're going to find on the topic - it covers every continent and most countries, with details on postcodes, street addresses and more. Very geeky, but also highly useful.

Re:Effective Addressing for International Mail

[jabuzz]

Add to that, his description of address formats for the United Kingdom are a load of rubbish, and don't remotely follow the correct addresses for properties laid out by the Royal Mail. Then again must people in the United Kingdon don't either, but that is still no excues for not following the proper Royal Mail approved address format.

Freeform!

[pv2b]

There's nothing more annoying than forms that require you to enter your address in a specific way that doesn't fit for that particular company. If you're shipping to only one country, that's fine, but otherwise:

What's wrong with just letting the user enter the address in a freeform text field? The user probably knows what his own address is, and can write it in a form that the local post office can deliver to. Just include a dropdown box for the country, and that should be all there's to it.

Universal Postal Union

[eyeball]

Try the Universal Postal Union, specifically documents they have on properly addressing international addresses.

Also, this looks interesting: International Address Standard UPU S42-1

(BTW, I know nothing about this stuff, but I found it via Wikipedia, which these days is proving itself more useful than Google.)

They Know Best, Not Your Database

[soliptic]

I work at an educational institution, as part of the student support team for some Distance Learning programmes. We have somewhere over 1000 students in somewhere over 90 countries.

I think frankly your best bet here is to be freeform. They know best how their addresses are written. So long as the country goes last, to get the parcel from your country out to the appropriate country, the rest of the address should be written to their custom so that their postal service will be most likely to deliver it.

I've seen all the things you describe - stuff like "90167 Bucharest" where the postcode precedes the city - and you're just not going to cope with all that if you try and enforce a complex system of validation.

Our database just has Address1-Address5 (use as many or as few as you want), Postcode (this can be blank), Country (this can't be).

When we tried entering a lot of addresses into the address book software of a certain well-known courier company, we ran into all sorts of problems. It would keep insisting on postcodes where they weren't appropriate, and so on. It's just more hassle than it's worth, and creates more problems (with literally not being able to enter what you know is correct) than it solves (stopping accidental bad data entry).