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UK post codes are, I believe, more finely grained than US zip codes. The lowest level represents a group of addresses whose letters could be bundled with a single rubber band. The regular postman will know his round sufficiently well to lay those out in the correct order.

[edited by: lawman at 11:34 am (utc) on Mar. 12, 2009]

In the UK some villages and even parts of towns have areas where dwellings are identified by names not numbers. e.g. "The Old Mill"
High Street
AANYTOWN
AB20 2QZ

These names should be registered at the post office and are an acceptable alternative to a house number.

The problems start when people name their house purely for snobbish reasons and stop using the number because they think that putting a little ceramic plaque on the gate is enough.

For that reason I always check customer addresses on the post office web site.

Most people in this country don't know their correct postal address - for instance the County is irrelevant all you need is the house number (or name), the street name, the Post town name(not the name of the suburb or vilage they live in), and the postcode.

In fact in the UK, a letter should reach you through just the house number and the post code, as post codes don't span more than one street (and in some cases one street will have numerous post codes, my husband once moved from 85 any street to 159 anystreet, and his postcode changed from 0DJ to 0EJ)

It's still best to put as many address details on the letter as possible though, as post town can be a long long way away, and should a letter be damaged and the post code not legible (or incorrect) the other details will help ensure a letter gets to the correct location. As I understand it the post office take relatively few of the details off the address unless there is a problem, so more details are more of a safety net than a necessity.

[edited by: Yoshimi at 12:01 pm (utc) on Mar. 12, 2009]

Living in Belgium, I often see foreign websites demand to know the province/state I live in. Provinces out here are purely administrative and utter irrelevancies when it comes down to addresses and should not be used on an address label as it can confuse (some cities and provinces share a name, even for those not living in the city).

My answer to these misguided websites is that I'll answer the question with "-", which most seem to accept as a valid answer.

I do think most people do know better how to properly write their address -so their postal services can find them- than any foreign website owner ever could hope for. With one exception: add the country, they might forget that one.

Even ordering fields can be tricky:

  Widgetstraat 50 
  1000 Brussel 

and

  50, Rue du Widget 
  1000 Bruxelles 

are the same -imaginary- street address in the heart of Brussels, one written in the Dutch fashion, one in the French fashion. If you mess with it, you mess with local politics and sensitivities you've no way to know enough about, hence my simple advice: leave it up to the customer ..., they do know.

I often see foreign websites demand to know the province/state I live in.

I know one North American service provider that insisted on having the official state abbreviation in customers' addresses. Luckily they only communicate by email, I'm not sure if a letter to England, Alabama would reach me!

Checking UK addresses against the PAF is fine but you may still upset customers as there are mistakes.

I believe that in the particular example you show, Haras El Paso is what's called a "loteamento" which seems to be more or less the equivalent of bairro, although perhsps even smaller and probably is simply a futher definition of the land, perhaps due to new construction.

If you mess with it, you mess with local politics and sensitivities you've no way to know enough about,

LOL - That's a sure way to have somebody just pitch your shipment or stomp on it a few times just 'because':))

Here in the US, with the 'official' USPS (which ought be broken up and privatized IMO) we are completely at the mercy of the individual postal person or office. There are post people that take any excuse to not deliver a package even though they know darn well exactly where it goes.

We ship out of two offices. I do some shipping from my town and the entire office is dedicated to doing as little as possible and keeping the quality of what actually gets done as low as possible. We have no choice but to paint on a smile and be as friendly as possible to people who should be fired en masse. Our main shipping office, where I've got two people that do nothing but handle orders work with one of the friendliest post offices one could ever hope to find. It doesn't hurt that we ship a lot of packages, and that we are completely prepared when we roll in the rack. Nevertheless, anything they can do if we need something special or an unusual situation arises, will be done. And gladly. We do everything we can to make their handling of our shipments a breeze - and they do the same for us. Professionalism - what a concept.

..................

With regard to forms and address:
95%+ of our business is domestic, but all of our shopping carts are designed to accommodate our international customers. For example, we offer four address lines. Rarely are more than two needed in the US. The extra doesn't hurt our domestic customers, but is a big help to our international customers. We do require the State (Province): field, even though we know that it doesn't matter in some countries, and that may still not be quite the right designation (district, etc.), but it works well enough and if they get flagged for not filling in the field, a simple - or N/A gets them back on track. We also ask for Zip Code (Postal Code): to try to make everybody feel as welcome as possible.

Though we do not do a lot of international business, we make a point of trying to accommodate those users. There seems to be no downside to having extra address fields or alternate descriptions of what the field is for. The average US based shopping cart cannot handle a complex international address, but the average US online business doesn't really want that business anyway. There are a few countries that we will not ship to, but have not taken any losses in long time. Fraud is a bigger concern than delivery but not a problem so far.

My favorite address of all time is in China. I wish that I still had it. Something like six goodly lines just for address. They had to separate the sections with commas, but knew what they were doing, so it was easy to follow. If I still had it I would print and post on the wall.

Staggering - the number of US customers that don't know where they live (And only need one address line!) or just assume that something close to correct is good enough. (Which it usually is, but I don't like to live so riskily.) We are forever editing accounts to standardize addresses, or running a search to find the correct address if the shipping software cannot standardize. Are US customers the most arrogant and deliberately stupid, or do I just think so because I have seen the enemy and they are us:))

I used to have a UK address that did not have a street name: flat number, building, The Barbican, London EC (I forget the rest of the postcode).

Sri Lankan side roads often have numbers rather than names, so a house number like 50/7 means house number 7 on the side road numbered 50.

City states like Singapore do not require separate country and province/city fields. Singapore also places the postcode after the name of the country.

In short, if you want accurate addresses, be very careful what you make required fields, and accept virtually anything as a valid address (apart from countries that you are SURE you know the acceptable address formats for).

Those towers in The Barbican are essentially vertical streets anyway.