Addressing addresses
Accurate, reliable and real-time address verification and auto-complete
You may have experienced it yourself: the frustration of discovering that a client has given you an incorrect address, and the time-wasting chore of searching for and finding the correct one.
It was a problem that had long been begging for a solution when the Abletech team took it on. Today, their aptly named Addressfinder is a huge success – trusted by companies throughout New Zealand and Australia, and getting 5-star reviews for its ingenuity, quality, security and reliability.
Software as a Service — Addressfinder
Abletech originally acquired Addressfinder in 2010 and slowly grew its enterprise customer base. On realising its potential to scale across businesses, it was rolled out as a SaaS (Software as a Service) product. This opened up new markets such as online shopping, making it easier and faster for retailers and their customers to complete order forms.
The concept was simple and remains largely unchanged today:
- When a customer starts entering their delivery address as part of the purchase process, Addressfinder searches for similar addresses from a secure, verified database. Within milliseconds it automatically populates the address fields with the correct street, suburb, city, postcode and other details.
- The retailer can be assured the address is real, deliverable and error-free, and the customer can be confident that their purchase will be delivered to the right place.
If you’ve shopped online yourself, you’ve probably already used Addressfinder to provide your address details. It’s a win-win for everyone, saving time at the checkout, eliminating typing mistakes, reducing frequent and often expensive mis-deliveries, and ultimately reducing retailers’ costs and protecting their brands and reputations.
Widening the reach
Addressfinder's strong beginnings and value and usability as an address finder and verification solution inevitably attracted interest from beyond the retail marketplace. Today it’s used in a wide range of other business applications. For example:
- legal firms, insurance companies and other professional service providers with large databases are finding Addressfinder a robust tool for due diligence purposes
- app developers appreciate Addressfinder’s reliability, data quality and sustainability. They’re using it for auto-completes in online check-outs and spreadsheets, and integrating it with their own products, including popular e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce, Shopify and Magento.
“Addressfinder is the answer to a lot of people’s prayers,” says Addressfinder CPO, Nigel Ramsay. “It’s easy to install, user friendly and requires no technical experience. It can also be customised by applying filters to include or exclude address types.
“Best of all, it delivers a good – even enjoyable – customer experience. We’re thrilled to have designed and built a product with long-term value and useability, and will continue to explore opportunities to improve it and take it to other clients around the world.”
The Abletech team chose Ruby on Rails for Addressfinder, recognising its benefits in security, performance, flexibility, productivity and cost-effectiveness.
The Abletech way
- Iteratively released small changes, gradually improving both the user and developer experience of the product
- Integrated SaaS signup, free plans, credit card payments
- Expanded market to include Australia
- Rolled out features and reporting to serve large enterprise clients
- SEO features and tuning to compete in the digital marketing space
Technologies used in the solution
- Ruby on Rails
- PostGIS
- ElasticSearch
- AWS
- Cloud66
