At Addy, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe that people should be delighted in their online experience, eliminating barriers by making every step of the way as simple as possible. We believe in creating a human experience by forgiving and correcting spelling mistakes, inspiring confidence that addresses are entered right the first time.

Addy finds the right address to help a child to receive her birthday present on time. Addy helps a business to find addresses and postcodes to reach new customers. Addy helps a fulfilment manager to lookup an address and validate the accuracy of a delivery address before an order is dispatched. Addy helps an analyst to transform and cleanse customer address data into accurate conformed results for actionable insights. We achieve our customers' goals by paying attention to the finest detail and leverage cutting edge technology to improve the user experience with advanced fuzzy matching techniques. We just happen to make great address finder software.

Addy's address lookup covers the North, South and Main Islands of New Zealand. The Chatham Islands are also included.

The address lookup API uses the Postal Address File (PAF) data source to cover 100% of New Zealand Post's delivery addresses.

Physical addresses, such as rural addresses, central business districts and major towns or cities are also included using the Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) - NZ Street Address data.

Not all addresses have a Delivery Point Identifier (DPID) because New Zealand Post does not deliver mail to all physical addresses such as a car park or some rural addresses.

Our full coverage of all the available DPID addresses are supplied by the New Zealand Postal Address File (PAF).

Addresses without a DPID are supplied by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ).

Addy's address lookup API returns postal address and non-postal addresses by default.

When making a call to the address lookup API, add the exundeliver=true parameter to exclude undeliverable addresses.

See Addy's address finder API documentation for more information.

Address Data Provides

• Postal Address File (PAF) - New Zealand Post
• Geo Postal Address File (GeoPAF) - New Zealand Post
• Address Information Management System (AIMS) - Land Information New Zealand (LINZ)

The PAF is Addy's master address data source.

When you autocomplete, validate or clean addresses, you have the option to assign a DPID to each customer address in your database. The DPID, which is a unique number of up to seven digits, simplifies the process of identifying duplicate customer addresses. De-duplication (de-dupe) will optimise data storage by eliminating duplicate copies of data and enable you to get a single view of your customers. A single customer view, also referred to as "Known Your Customer" (KYC), enables your business to understand who and where your customers are.

Using the Delivery Point Identifier (DPID), your business can:

• Allocate the correct postal address to customers
• Create a single customer view
• Reduce duplication in your database
• Reduce the number of duplicate letters sent to the same customer or household
• Accurately identify the number of unique customers you have
• Match your address data with third party lists (e.g. New Zealand Business Number (NZBN)) for prospecting and direct marketing campaigns

Address results are returned in a standardise format in accordance to NZ Post's address formatting guidelines to reduce returned or undelivered mail, and help your organisation to become eligible for Bulk Mail rates through the Statement of Accuracy (SoA) Programme.

Access the PAF data via the Address APIs:

• Use Addy's address finder API to retrieve addresses based on partial address segments (search criteria).
• Use Addy's address detail API to retrieve detailed address information using the DPID.

The GeoPAF is Addy's master geocoding address data source.

Each address has map coordinates which can be used for:

• Visualising customers on a map (e.g. insurance companies analysing risks)
• Group customers by region and area (e.g. targeting the right customers you need to engage)
• Enable better emergency, pick-up and delivery services (e.g. route optimisation and accurate pin point locations)

The Parcel ID provides a link to the Property and Land Titles database maintained by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ). A Parcel ID can be tied to a polygon area, appellation (legal description), purpose, size and a list of legal titles associated with a parcel.

The Meshblock provides a link to the smallest geographic unit for which statistical data is collected and processed by Statistics New Zealand (Stats NZ). Match your customer addresses to a Meshblock for rich insights into New Zealand households using census information. Use the Meshblock to enrich your customer data for greater target marketing with over 50 demographic characteristics such as income, age group, occupation, number of children and more.

Access the GeoPAF data via the Address APIs:

• Use the address detail API to retrieve detailed geocoding, Parcel ID and Meshblock address information.
• Use the Discovery Address API to retrieve a list of addresses linked to a LINZ Parcel ID or Stats NZ Meshblock.
• Use the Geocode Address API to retrieve addresses from GPS coordinates for reverse geocoding.
• Use the Bounding Box Address API to retrieve a list of addresses from a polygon shape of coordinates.

Additional non-mail delivery addresses, such as land titles, parking lots and empty sites are supplied by Land Information New Zealand's (LINZ) road, address and places data, complete with geographical information. LINZ is responsible for holding official address and road, and electoral streets and places data. Through the New Zealand Geographic Board, LINZ is also the source of official geographic names. Addy use LINZ's Address Information Management System (AIMS) as a centralised database of national addresses.

Access the LINZ data via the Address APIs:

• Use the address detail API to retrieve detailed address information using the LINZ ID (Street Address ID)
• Use the Discovery Address API to retrieve a list of addresses linked to a Parcel ID

Postal addresses sources from New Zealand Post (PAF & GeoPAF) are updated quarterly (January, April, July and October). Land and Information New Zealand (LINZ) data is updated monthly (if an update is available).

The Postal Address File (PAF) and Geographic Postal Address File (GeoPAF), is New Zealand's most complete and up-to-date database of postal addresses.

Google provides a place autocomplete address forum and autocomplete for addresses and search terms service.

There are a two main considerations before investing time and effort into Google's address autocomplete solution.

Google's address autocomplete are incomplete because it does not include all of New Zealand's mail delivery points, such as post office boxes, locked bags, private bags, PO boxes, Community Boxes or Rural District addresses. This can be problematic for businesses that allow users to sign up to mailing services such as magazines subscriptions.

Addresses are not 100% accurate. New Zealand has many subdivided properties. Google often only knows about the land deposit number. For example, Google knows about "92 Francis Street, Hauraki, Auckland" but the delivery address is either 92A or 92B (1/92 or 2/92) Francis St.

The image above shows that lot 92 Francis Street contains two properties.

The image above shows that Google only knows about 92 Francis Street.

Google will also accept "fake" addresses such as 5/92 or 92E Francis St, which doesn't actually exist. This makes Google unsuitable for address cleansing and validation.

The image above shows that Google returns fake address results.

Accurate and valid addresses are important to ensure customers' online orders are delivered to the right place.

License Restriction (section 10.5.d), "No caching or storage. You will not pre-fetch, cache, index, or store any Content..."

You can use Google's address autocomplete service to help your users locate their address details such as the Street, City and Zip Code but you can't store it in your database. This might not be useful for registration forms or capturing delivery addresses. According to section 10.5.d.1, you may store limited data for caching purposes if it "is temporary (and in no event more than 30 calendar days)". This would be a serious problem if you plan to store customer addresses for more than 30 days.

Mailtown is the town or city that New Zealand Post use as a delivery point.

City is the name for the town or city assigned by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ).

Addy's address finder API provides an optional ability to filter address results to only include addresses that can be delivered by New Zealand Post.

Use the postcode return in the detailed address lookup to determine which island an address is located in.

North Island postcodes range from 0000 to 6999.

South Island postcodes range from 7000 to 9999.

Yes! Check out our address cleansing service here!

Address cleansing, matching and validation for an accurate address database

What is Address Cleansing Software?

Address cleansing software, also called address validation or address matching software, helps to transform incomplete, improperly formatted or duplicate addresses stored in a database into accurate addresses validated against official address databases, such as the New Zealand Postal Address File (PAF).

What are the benefits of Address Cleansing Software?

Address cleansing software will correct a number of mistakes, such as adding a missing postcode, suburb or city. Since addresses are formatted according to NZ Post standards and a unique NZ Post DPID and/or a Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) Street ID is returned for each address, it becomes an easy task to find and remove duplicate records.

Using address cleansing software, such as validate-as-you-type address autocomplete or bulk address cleansing can save a significant amount of time and can be more cost effective than fixing errors manually.

What Address Cleansing Software do we offer?

Addy's address cleansing software combine activities such as:

• Bulk address cleansing, formatting and standardisation using a CSV spreadsheet (fast)
• Address cleansing, formatting and standardisation using an Excel spreadsheet macro (slow)
• Real-time address validation, using an address suggest / address autocomplete plugin to prevent errors at the point of capture
• Integrate address cleansing into Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) processes by calling the address validation APIs (aka. the Address Correction API ) or the Address Cleansing API

The quest for uniform addresses

Let's start by exploring what address standardisation is. It is the process of changing addresses to a uniform format. In mathematical and computer science terms, standardisation is also referred to as a canonical model or schema that is a design pattern used to create an agreed data definition that will standardize communication for better business integration.

SQL Database queries are great at performing exact matches fast and accurately when addresses are in a standardized format. It is also easier for business analytics and developers to identify duplicate customers with uniformity to simplify the duplication (de-dupe) process to find and identify unique customers based on postal and delivery addresses.

In an ideal world, everyone would enter their full address in a consistent format but this is seldom the case. Below is a list of common user input inconsistencies that address data cleansing and address correction software resolve.

Capitalisation in Addresses

Addresses capitalisation formatting can include lower case, upper case, camel case and mixed cases:

• 80 queen street, auckland, 1010 (lower case)
• 80 QUEEN STREET, AUCKLAND, 1010 (upper case)
• 80 Queen Street, Auckland, 1010 (camel case)
• 80 Queen Street, AUCKLAND, 1010 (city in upper case)

It is common that only the city is entered in all capital letters.

Abbreviations of Address Segments

Abbreviations are one of the most common reasons for inconsistencies. Abbreviations can occur at any segment or fragment of an address, including the number, street name, road type, suburb and city:

• Lvl 1, Unit 2, 123 Saint John Road, Auckland, 1010 (Level)
• Level 1, 2/123 Saint John Road, Auckland, 1010 (Unit Number)
• Level 1, Unit 2, 123 St John Road, Auckland, 1010 (Street name)
• Level 1, Unit 2, 123 Saint John Rd, Auckland, 1010 (Road type)
• Level 1, Unit 2, 123 Saint John Road, Akl, 1010 (City)

Spelling Correction

Spelling mistakes can lead to an undeliverable address so it is important to correct commonly misspelled words such as city names and street names with swapped letters, missing letters or incorrect letters:

• Phoenix Road vs Pheonix Road (swapped letter)
• Hamilton vs Hamlton (missing letter)
• Boulevard vs Boulivard (incorrect letter)

Addy uses advanced fuzzy address matching techniques to correct a range of typos.

Uniform address names

Unit, street and city names can vary, yet still be correct:

• Floor vs Level (Synonym)
• Unit vs Flat (Synonym)
• Hamilton vs Hamilton City (City suffix)
• Quay Park vs Quay Park West (Street direction)

Number formatting

As shown in the abbreviation section, address numbers can vary greatly which will lead to inconsistencies:

• 2/80 Queen vs 80B Queen vs 2-80 Queen
• Unit 2, 80 Queen vs Flat 2, 80 Queen

Missing Information

Another common issue is when address information is incomplete, missing the suburb, city or postcode:

• 88 Francis Street, Hauraki, Auckland 0622 (Full address)
• 88 Francis Street, Auckland 0622 (Missing suburb)
• 88 Francis Street, Hauraki, Auckland (Missing postcode)
• 88 Francis Street, Hauraki 0622 (Missing city)

Postal Statement of Accuracy (SOA)

Even though the postal services may still locate a poorly formatted address, there is a potential for delivery delays and additional charges. For example, if an incorrect postcode is entered, the mail sorting team may look at the postcode first to sort the mail to go to the right city first before realising that the address must be corrected and redirected again.

Having accurate addresses is so important that NZ post offers discounts when companies have accurate mailing addresses verified through the statement of accuracy (SOA) programme.

Address Correction Software

Using Addy's address finder API will help your customers to find their addresses up to 80% faster and ensure that accurate, validated and standardized addresses are captured at the start.

Addy also provides an address cleaning excel spreadsheet software for bulk address correction.

The free address plan includes full access to all of Addy's address services that can be used for address lookups, address validation and address cleansing.

• 500 free completed address lookup requests per month
• No limits
• No throttling
• No advertisements

Addy provides an Enterprise premium plan that allows companies unlimited address API access.

Addy also offer an on-premise option where you can host our address API on your own server. This option is ideal to handle large volumes of data using your own fast local network traffic instead of an Internet connection.

Contact us to find out more.

A completed address lookup is when a user selects an address from the address suggestions and the address fields are filled in automatically.

You will not be charged for every key or character that a user types.

Architecture Overview

Addy's traffic flows though Cloudflare for security, performance and multi-region load balancing to replicated, geo-redundant, stateless address servers hosted on Microsoft Azure as shown below.

• Floor vs Level (Synonym)
• Unit vs Flat (Synonym)
• Hamilton vs Hamilton City (City suffix)
• Quay Park vs Quay Park West (Street direction)

Scalability

Microsoft's Azure cloud services provide horizontal scalability per region, by running a minimum of 2 address servers, hosted in Australia East and Australia Southeast data centres.

High Availability

Cloudflare provides a safeguard from service disruptions with load balancing across two Azure regions, automatic failover, geographic routing and active health checks against addresses servers.

Scheduled: Load balancing enables Addy to update address data, apply API changes and patches without disrupting in-flight requests.

Unscheduled: In case a server goes down unexpectedly (e.g. due to hardware failure), health check monitors will detect the failure and route traffic to healthy servers.

High Availability

Addy uses Cloudflare for:

• DDoS attack protection to maintain performance and availability
• DNS reverse proxy to hide origin servers from end-users
• Firewall rules to remedy against specific IP addresses and provide rate limiting when needed
• Web Application Firewall to stop threats at the edge server

Addy uses Azure for:

• Elastic scalability
• Active performance and utilisation monitoring with alerts

Visit the API Key Best Practices page for information about API Key Security

Performance

Addy uses Cloudflare for:

• Content Delivery Network (CDN) for fast, reliable JavaScript and CSS delivery
• Web workers to cache requests and improve performance
• Argo to route traffic across the fastest, most reliable paths

Addy uses Azure for:

• High spec instances to load addresses into memory for fast address validation

Response Times

The response times against the address autocomplete API, searching for an address is shown below, which is under 50 milliseconds per request:

Note: The response time can vary based on factors such as the Internet connection speed, proxies, ISP routing and more.

Over 30% of requests have a response time of 25 milliseconds or less. The average response time globally is around 107 milliseconds accross devices and Internet connections using Argo as shown below.

Metrics captured 21 July 2019.

Addy's address finder software has to be highly reliable and scalable to meet enterprise-level demands.

The address API is hosted in the cloud for high availability; spanning across multiple data centres with geo-redundancy, auto-scaling and failover capabilities.

Addy's address finder services are trusted by some of New Zealand's largest, leading retailers with busy websites to lookup addresses quickly, reliably, and accurately.

In the unlikely event that all of the national and international data centres are unavailable, Addy's address autocomplete client-side script will detect the temporary outage and revert back to the manual address input form so that you don't miss out on a sales opportunity.

A lot of effort went into performance tuning and optimisation to ensure that address results can typically be returned within 0.1 sec (100 ms).

Addy's address lookup API is hosted in the cloud that is distributed across multiple geographical data centres to provide redundancy and load balancing.

Our dedicated servers are optimised to handle large volumes of address lookups per second to serve busy websites.

Our address lookup APIs are monitored 24/7 and can scale and handle unexpected or peak demands that websites typically experience during busy holiday seasons.

Addy's address APIs are hosted in the cloud across multiple data centres. The APIs are stateless, RESTful services sitting behind a traffic controller to route requests to active APIs. When an address API update is in progress, the incoming traffic will be routed to active APIs so that users do not experience any downtime. Once the address API upgrade is successful, and several address lookup tests were performed, then the updated address API will become active and serve user requests.

This is an effective technique to maximise uptime and to ensure our APIs stay available even during upgrades.

All of our APIs are monitored 24/7 and in the unlikely event that a server fails, all of the traffic will be routed to healthy, online address APIs automatically.