Can anyone comment as to whether better site conversion is seen when the user enters their house number themself vs. displaying a dropdown for the user to select their property.

Both options are available from royal mail at different costs, but it would be great to know which version converts higher?

It’s really a nice article and I was looking for such script since a long time. Could you please tell me from where can I get such type of script which can populate data automatically?

Thanks,
Sumit Kumar

Try looking up a postcode on the Royal Mail’s own postcode finder. Try looking for something which doesn’t fit their pattern. I was looking for the postcode of an address in a smallish village called Crawcrook. I spent ages putting in all sorts of variants of Crawcrook, Ryton and Gateshead into the form, since the form wanted me to enter the “town” in the “town” field – but I wasn’t looking for an address in a town.

Eventually I discovered (after doing a reverse lookup from the other database, using a known nearby postcode to generate an acceptable address) that the Royal Mail didn’t want to include the name of the village at all. Put in “Crawcrook” in any line in the finder, in any combination, and the form will tell you “no can do.”

Couldn’t someone arrange it so that the db software could go through the information in the form to locate a recognised town, and then go from there? This is the Royal Mail we’re taking about after all, not a student end-of-year project.

US forms are as bad – they always want you to enter “City” in the city field – which is tough if you live in, say Hexham – a good-sized market town, with an NE postcode, but miles from Newcastle, which certainly does not appear in Hexham postal addresses. And as for US forms which won’t let you proceed until you’ve told them which US state you live in …

Mind you there was one such form which wanted a state, but didn’t validate the results. I tried but failed to leave it empty, and eventually settled for “Very Cross”, which described the state I was in.

The other thing which is irritating me just at the moment (and the reason Google led me here) is that I am trying to locate a particular postcode database – I just don’t know which one.

Most of the usual web lookup forms are based on the Royal Mail database, and seem to give the right results. However, there are a significant number of web forms, and some used by call centre staff) which have a wrong entry for my address.

They list us as “9 Oak Way”, where it should be “9 Pilgrim’s Court, Oak Way.” (Actual address different for obvious reasons). Unfortunately there IS a “9 Oak Way” as well, which leads to problems with deliveries. I suspect that there’s one postcode database out there which has the wrong information in it.

I would like to get hold of the people who sell and (presumably) update that database and get them to correct it. Finding out who it is, however, is not easy. Just imagine ringing a company,

“Hello, you’re talking to Fubra, my name is Sandi, can I help you?”

“Hello, you got me address wrong on your web form, and …”

“Can I have your customer number please?”

“I’m not a customer, I would like to speak to your IT department.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t put you through to other departments, would you like to explain the problem.”

“You’ve got my address wrong – and I don’t care about this with you, but I want to know which company supplies your postcode lookup database.”

“Could I have your customer number please?”

And that’s assuming you’ve someone trying to help in Walsall, not someone following a script in Mumbai.

Okay, whinge over. The moral of the story is that maintaining database accuracy means having your sales staff able to pass a problem on to you, not just try (and fail) to correct the screen in front of them.

You’re absolutely right – validating address fields to make sure they only contain allowed characters can cause a lot of problems for users, unless it’s done very carefully.

Unfortunately, it isn’t always genuine users who will try to submit data through your form – validating user input against an allowed white-list of characters helps to prevent many security exploits – which is the reason that so many websites do this.

To do this well requires some thoughtful coding – for instance, you will need to allow for accented letters if you want to accept orders from mainland Europe, exclamation marks for people who live in Westward Ho! and curly quotes for people who like to cut-and-paste text from Microsoft Word (yes, people do this, and more often than you might think).

It’s easy to forget about scenarios such as these, which is where the problems arise.