9 Au 2012: WorldAddresses.com, the provider of online international address lookup software, has today announced the availability of an additional 41 countries’ address data, including those of popular UK trade partners Canada and New Zealand, and the complete county data for the United States. This announcement brings the total number of countries and territories supported by WorldAddresses.com’s address lookup software to 112.

This update comes after the release of the Royal Mail-sponsored 2012 International Delivery Report, issued by retail and hospitality technology provider Micros, which includes recommendations for best practice e-commerce – a principle one of which is to support international address lookup and accurate address capture, as some 24% of international deliveries from ecommerce sites were found to arrive later than expected. The company points out that, while this is a valid and valuable recommendation from the report, individual countries’ addresses are typically not structured uniformly, meaning that importing and exporting goods to multiple countries becomes next to impossible to co-ordinate simply, as a single address database cannot be constructed.

To counter this, WorldAddresses.com takes raw address data from individual countries and, using intelligent processing routines within its software, restructures the dataset into the Universal Postal Union’s international addressing templates – the Standard S42 format.

The 41-strong latest batch of new countries restructured in this fashion includes Canada and New Zealand – who were particularly sought after by WorldAddresses.com’s customers – and Russia, China and India – a further three of the UK’s top 20 trade partners.

Emma Gooderham, Managing Director of WorldAddresses.com, commented: “In order for UK retailers to take full advantage of valued international trade partners, they must be suitably equipped to meet the demand from these countries, a crucial element of which is the ability to deliver accurately to foreign locations. The 2012 International Delivery Report is therefore absolutely right to recommend to online retailers that in order to do so, they must make it easier to capture reliable international address data. But with the variety of address structures around the globe, this is by no means an easy undertaking and it is precisely because of this variety that we are dedicating time and resource to converting as many of the international datasets as possible into the widely recognised Standard S42 format.

“The International Delivery Report shows that only a small number of retailers are supporting address look-up technology – reinforcing a commonly-held misconception that providing international address lookup functionality is either prohibitively expensive or simply unnecessary. However, with the combination of almost a quarter of international online retail deliveries failing to be delivered on time – largely due to inaccurate delivery details – and WorldAddresses.com’s flexible purchase scheme, the provision of such a tool becomes nothing short of an affordable necessity.”

The 41 new UPU datasets are:

• Albania
• Algeria
• Bangladesh
• Barbados
• Bermuda
• Bolivia
• Brunei Darussalam
• Cambodia
• Canada
• Cayman Islands
• China
• Colombia
• Costa Rica
• Croatia
• Cyprus
• Dominican Republic
• Egypt
• El Salvador
• Estonia
• Georgia
• Ghana
• Greece
• Guinea-Bissau
• India
• Indonesia
• Jordan
• Kuwait
• Lithuania
• Luxembourg
• New Zealand
• Paraguay
• Peru
• Philippines
• Russian Federation
• Saudi Arabia
• Tunisia
• United Arab Emirates
• Uruguay
• Uzbekistan
• Venezuela
• Viet Nam