17 May 2012: Independent online fire retailer GasFire.co.uk has announced that it has seen a ‘vast improvement’ in its ordering process this week after installing address validation from Postcode Anywhere on its Magento ecommerce website. The company believes that the technology is something consumers now “expect to see”, in line with findings from a survey last year by Postcode Anywhere that found that over a third of UK consumers now expect address auto-fill when checking out online.

Available on the Magento Connect marketplace, Postcode Anywhere’s address data auto-completion app for Magento provides UK and international address auto-fill for all the standard entry screens within Magento Community Edition. The address look-up plugin uses a pay-as-you-go credit system and is free to download for any user.

Kevin Law, Managing Director of GasFire.co.uk, said: “We’ve been using Postcode Anywhere for nearly 10 years and when they launched their Magento extension it was the ideal solution. The time we save is the key thing. The quicker we process an order, the better it is for the customer. The postcode accuracy ensures our product gets to the right address on time – which is very important. A failed delivery can also have a hugely negative impact. Not only is it expensive and time-consuming to get things rescheduled, but it has a knock-on effect: everything ends up delayed, onerous and frustrating.

“As a bolt-on service it was easy to install and is very responsive to our customers’ needs.”

Law also believes that his customers now expect to be able to make use of address validation when they order online. He said: “ I think customers these days expect to see postcode look-up. We are very impressed with the way the service works with our Magento integration, how compatible it is, and how it works seamlessly and effortlessly in the background.

“There’s nothing more damaging to your company’s reputation than dealing with an irate customer who has taken the day off to take delivery of a gas fire that never turns up. You then have to track it through the couriers, get it redelivered, and reschedule the installation process. It’s an expensive nightmare and the reputational damage it can do to your business is unquantifiable.”

Postcode Anywhere’s Managing Director Guy Mucklow said: “Failure to deliver the goods online always results in reputation damage, and the effects can be irreversible. As a supplier of one-off, lifetime purchases, the Gas Fire Company relies on its excellent reputation as a retailer to attract new customers and maintain sales. We’re constantly reinvesting in our online address auto-fill technology to do our part in helping online retailers do just that. This includes adding daily updates as standard for the freshest data, and the launch of our new service, Capture+, which auto-fills address fields from any international address fragment, not just the postal code – opening up the benefits of address auto-completion to an international audience. Capture+ will also shortly be available for Magento.”