Live address checker during checkout
Completed
We have customers that forget to add their apt # or make a typo while inputting their shipping address during checkout. Endicia catches it before we ship, but we still have to email them, wait on a reply, sometimes follow up with call after no email response, leave a message, wait on a return call, etc... major time and effort headache/expense.
We'd like the shipping address checked in live time during checkout so that the customer can be alerted and prompted for verification and/or correction if needed immediately during the checkout process. A quick google search reveals numerous 3rd party Magento extensions to do this that I'd think would be an easy install into Zoey if not practical for Zoey to develop it's own native live address checker.
As an example, one we ran across and liked is addrexx.com as it seemed to catch missing apt #'s better (some of the other address checkers we tested didn't catch missing apt #'s as long as the street name and number were correct) and the user interface seems to be pretty good. It also has predictive text auto fill capabilities for quicker checkouts. They have a demo store at http://magento.addrexx.com/ in which you can add an item to cart, go to checkout, and demo their address checker as our customers would experience.
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5/5/2017: At this point in time, Addressy currently doesn't add any value to our store (we actually think it adds negative value in it's current form, and we have thus disable it). The people at Addressy are very responsive, understanding, and have been great, but their product simply doesn't deliver. They are working on improvements, and indicate they hope to have a much better product in another month or two. We intend to give them another chance at that point provided another similar product hasn't already come along that functions well.
That sums it up in a nutshell. Read on only if interested in long winded detail.
A big problem we think is they are trying to predict and auto complete/correct the entire address as you begin typing in the first few characters of the street address. So on addresses with common names of streets ("main", "oak", "2nd"), there are too many results for it to provide a realistic selection to pick from in a drop down list. Think about how many "Main St" addresses there are across the US.
Their fuzzy logic is currently way too fuzzy, and their claimed "location biasing" functionality designed to help with the above issue doesn't seem to work (they detect where the user is located, and out of all the possible matches they attempt to give bias to the ones closest to the user). Type in "123 Main" on the location demo found on their website and set to be biased to New York: https://www.addressy.com/features/location-biasing/. Their top predictive guess displayed is "123 2nd Ave S Unit MAIN, EDMONDS WA". How is "123 2nd Ave" is the best guess when someone types "123 Main"? Wouldn't any of the numerous "123 Main St" (or Ave, Rd, Blvd, etc) addresses across the US not be a better guess than "2nd Ave"? And if they're giving location bias to NY, how is a WA state address the top choice?
Here's a real life example a customer experienced and called us about when she was very upset that our checkout kept auto changing her correct address into an incorrect one and she couldn't figure out how to get around that. Her street address was "xx Vista Rd", and that address in that exact format is a valid address that can be found in the USPS database and can be validated exactly like that within Addressy if you know how to get there.
But when the customer entered "xx Vista Rd" into the street address textbox, Addressy didn't even list it in the drop down box options of possible address matches. But that was her full street address, so there was nothing further to type in that street address box to narrow down the search results in the drop box. The drop down box covered up the city, state, and zip fields, so she couldn't click on one of those to continue on. If she clicked on the street address box to try to manually enter what she typed instead of selecting one of the drop down box choices, Addressy defaulted to the first choice in the drop down box of "xx Vistard Ct". Re-click on the street address box to correct it and you're right back where you started... the drop down that covers the city, state, zip fields reappears, any manual corrections are re-autocorrected back to the wrong address.
Here's the "if you know how to get there" trick mentioned previously... If you enter "xx Vista Rd" in the street address box and continue typing the beginning of the city name or zip in the same street address box, the exact match will show up in the dropdown box and populate all fields properly when you select it (it will remove the city you enter in the street address box and put it in the city box where it belongs). But who is going to enter the city in the street address box? Everyone knows the city goes in the box labeled "city", not "street".
If you enter "xx Vista Rd", and there is an exact match for that in your database, why would you not show that possibility at all and instead show "xx Vistard Ct" as the most likely match? And why is there not an option to enter an address manually? Sometimes a valid address is not in the database, like new construction for example. Clearly this app was put into live production prematurely. We really wanted to like this app, and we haven't given up on them. Again, they seem to be good folks, are aware of the issues, and are working on it.
In further fairness to Addressy, I would note that our above experience and opinions are for Addressy when used in the Zoey platform only and dealing with US addresses. We have not tried it on other platforms.
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