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Unison

Validate, Cleanse & Maintain Data Quality Without Programming.

Service Bureau

Melissa's consulting services are customized to your projects.

SaaS

Clean and update your data in the cloud, no software required.

What We Do

Global Address Verification & Validation for 240+ Countries & Territories

Melissa’s Global Address Verification service verifies and validates addresses at the point of entry and in batch to ensure only valid billing and shipping addresses are captured and used in your systems.

  • Leverage  a postal certified address engine using official government data including CASS (USPS), SERP (Canada Post), PAF (Royal Mail) and more
  • Correct & verify international addresses & e by adding missing components such as postal codes, locality, and more
  • Standardize/normalize  addresses to meet local in-country formatting rules
  • Transliterate  to and from native country languages and Latin
  • dd precise lat/long coordinates  A up to the rooftop (delivery point) level
 
 
 
 
 

"We find electronic verification is the way to go because it makes the user's life easier. Users register faster and can start using our platform right away."

Vsevolod Babiev Business Analyst @ eToro

Melissa G2 Awards

Always recognized and praised

How It Works

How Melissa's Address Verification & Validation Service Works

address-capture

Capture Address

Autocompletes and/or verifies a postal address at point of entry so bad data never enters your system.

address-parsed

Parse Address

Uses proprietary lexicons & rules to parse an address into its component parts.

address-standardized

Standardized Address

Conforms an address to USPS address validation standards or local country format.

address-verified

Verify Address

Uses authoritative, in-country reference datasets to check the validity & deliverability of a physical address with our address validation service.

address-transliterated

Transliterate Address

Uses authoritative, in-country reference datasets to check the validity & deliverability of a physical address with our address validation service.

address-output

Validate Address

A clean, deliverable postal address checked & ready for mailing, order fulfilment, or analytics.

Capture >
Parse >
Standardize >
Verify >
Transliterate >
Validate!

Try It Now

Verify a U.S., Canadian or international address

 

Melissa's Address Verification

4 Key Differentiators

Start with Address AutoComplete

Utilize Melissa address check for fast, accurate address capture at point of entry. Our Express Entry solution powers your web forms and CRM with type-ahead address autocompletion – ensuring only a verified, standardized and complete address enters your database.

  • Autocomplete addresses to speed up order entry with reduced keystrokes
  • Real-time address verification & validation eliminates shipping costs due to incorrect addresses
  • Autofill all address fields – misspellings are prevented, abbreviations completed and missing information is added
address-verification-us-global-address-data

The U.S. Address Validation Experts

For 40 years, Melissa has been a leading address management and mailing solutions provider. We have decades of experience handling the irregularities and common mistakes that arise when people write addresses. As a USPS CASS-certified provider, we utilize the following to keep your addresses correct, up-to-date and deliverable

  • DPV® (Delivery Point Validation) data to verify the address is deliverable and mail can be sent to that address
  • LACSLink® (Locatable Address Correction System) data to match your address data to addresses that have been converted, modified, or changed by the USPS
  • SuiteLink® data to add missing known secondary information including suite numbers
  • eLOT® (Enhanced Line of Travel) which helps sort mailings in approximate carrier-casing sequence

Melissa also provides a wealth of proprietary capabilities including RBDI (residential or business delivery indicator), AddressPlus® (adds known apartment numbers to residences), Non-USPS data (5+ million addresses not supported by USPS) and MAK® persistent address identifier key technology which tracks all changes to addresses over time.

address-capture

A Single Interface for All International Addresses Verified

The Melissa global address verification service empowers you to verify and correct addresses in a single country or in 240+ countries around the world – from a single interface. We’ve done all the heavy lifting to combine the varied addressing systems internationally so you can quickly and accurately verify an address in real-time, at point of entry. When you submit an address, our solution performs advanced lexicon and parsing for each country and we can return the address as either:

  • Formatted and standardized to a specific postal authority’s regulations in a mailing label or database storage format.
  • Parsed in separate address fields such as house number, thoroughfare, locality, postal code, etc.
address-verification-single-interface

Address Transliteration and Multiple Language Support

Transliterating address data improves deliverability & reduces costly errors by ensuring international mail pieces arrive at the correct address.

We support multiple language scripts, including:

  • Cyrillic (Russia)
  • Hellenic (Greece)
  • Hebrew (Israel)
  • Arabic (United Arab Emirates)
  • Kanji (Japan)
  • Chinese (China)
  • Hangul (South Korea)
  • Thai (Thailand)
address-verification-international-address-transliteration

Need Help?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is address verification?

Address verification (or address validation/address check) refers to checking the correctness and plausibility or accuracy of postal address data. Online, spelling mistakes, incorrect house numbers or postcodes and sometimes even formatting errors can quickly occur.

How much does address verification cost?

Investing in an address verification solution is not a cost factor, but a value-added factor. It does involve expenditure, but this is quickly amortised. However, if companies neglect address quality, costs of up to 100 euros per data record can be incurred due to incorrect mailings, returns and missed sales opportunities.


Melissa offers its web service for international address verification as a pay-as-you-go variant and in prepaid packages. With the PAYG model, transactions are billed according to monthly usage. A volume of 1,000 checks costs just 55 euros per month. For the prepaid packages, on the other hand, we calculate your annual transaction requirements. For example, if you buy a package with 100,000 queries, an address verification costs 0.028 euros per web service transaction. Depending on the application scenario (e.g. address verification only in the DACH region), we are happy to customise the prices to your individual needs. If you use several of our web services, you can also benefit from discounted bundles. Just get in touch with us! Incidentally, the costs per web service transaction are the same for all countries. This means you can use your volume for every country supported by Melissa. You can find more information about our prices here.

What can Melissa's international address verification do and what is the easiest way to implement it?

Global address verification offers a cloud-based REST API for checking and validating postal addresses worldwide and enriching them, e.g. with geocoordinates, correction, standardisation, formatting and transliteration.

 

Addresses can be transmitted to the following web service endpoint in JSON, XML or REST format: https://address.melissadata.net/v3/WEB/GlobalAddress/doGlobalAddress

 

Note: A valid licence key is also required for successful validation. To obtain a licence key, please contact our sales team at sales@melissa.de.

In addition, our Global Address Web Service API endpoint offers two processing modes to enable both real-time use (e.g. in an online shop checkout system or as part of a new customer registration process) and batch processing of already existing address data within databases.

For real-time validation, we recommend the use of HTTP GET requests, while batch checks can be realised using HTTP POST requests. In addition to multithreading, batch processing enables the simultaneous processing of up to 100 addresses per web service request. This speeds up processing, even with large amounts of data.

 

Along with the complete address, which is formatted according to postal standards, Melissa returns a set of machine-readable result codes and all associated address elements in the individual database fields.


Our large selection of result codes is generally divided into the following categories to make it easier for you to create your own business rules:

  • Address Error Codes (AE-Codes): These indicate various errors or problems with the checked address or individual address elements.
  • Address Change Codes (AC-Codes): These indicate corrections and/or additions of additional address elements by the web service.
  • Address Validation Codes (AV-Codes): These provide a granular evaluation of the validated address. Here, you can see whether an address could be fully or only partially validated or up to which address level (house number level, street level, city level) validation was possible.

Why is address verification a “must-have”, especially in the e-commerce sector? What are the benefits?

Ensuring that addresses are correct is a key issue in e-commerce as, according to various surveys, around 20% of all addresses entered contain errors - whether intentional or unintentional. This can have far-reaching and costly consequences for online shops, but also for your CRM or ERP system, especially when it comes to international addresses. This is because finding the right addresses is time consuming and expensive for businesses. You can achieve the following benefits with valid customer addresses:

  • Cost reduction through fewer returns and address corrections
  • Fraud prevention
  • On-time delivery for a positive customer experience thanks to standardised and formatted addresses in accordance with the country's official requirements
  • Increase in sales
  • Digital customer onboarding
  • Automatic address completion for a positive shopping experience (in combination with address autocomplete)

How does address verification work? And how can I use it?

In general, it can be said that the address verification follows the following process in 6 steps:

  1. Capture: Addresses are checked and/or automatically completed in real time. This ensures that no incorrect data enters your system.
  2. Parse: The addresses are parsed into their component parts with the help of proprietary lexicons and rules.
  3. Standardisation: The address output is standardised and complies with the official specifications of the national postal authorities.
  4. Verification: Authoritative, in-country reference data is used to check whether the physical address is valid and deliverable.
  5. Transliteration: Non-Latin character sets can be converted into the Latin character set – and vice versa. This means that your delivery also reaches customers with different language character sets.
  6. Output: You receive a valid and standardised address within seconds, which you can use for shipping, order fulfilment or analysis.

You can easily implement address verification via an interface (on-premise or cloud). You can use the solution both in real time and in batch mode. Alternatively, you can also provide us with your file via sftp transfer and we will cleanse it for you as a service (Service Bureau).

For which countries can I use Melissa's address verification?

Our address verification is available for over 240 countries and territories. You can find an overview here. In addition, our address verification solution also supports various language character sets. It can assign 40-character sets and transliterate 8-character sets.


Try Melissa's Address Verification & Validation Tool Now

Verify a U.S., Canadian or international address. Output includes latitude/longitude coordinates.