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Comment by sharpercoder | Hacker News Reader

I have also encountered web forms which must validate my address. Turns out, the backing database did not contain my address. I could not order at the store. After contacting the store, they told me that their data was always accurate and therefore I must be a fraud.

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The first time I ordered something from Amazon to be delivered to my workplace, I spent like half an hour trying different variations of the address so that it would pass the validation. And my workplace is a university building where 200+ people work, in a European country.

Finally, I got it to work by typing "Campus of <X> Place, Faculty of <Y> Building". It wouldn't work without the words "Place" and "Building", which we don't ever use (we typically just write "Faculty of <Y>, Campus of <X>"). And the form didn't provide any clue about that being the problem.

The address on a letter has always been a free text input field, it still is when one writes private letters, and everything works fine. Why they have to complicate so much something that just works is beyond me.

I guess in some Asian places the Z coordinate is also required, like Floor 24

Aren't post boxes on the ground floor with names and flat/unit numbers?

Packages that don’t fit post boxes still need to be delivered.

Also some places don’t show names for different reasons, so having accurate numbers refering to the good entities can be critical.

To make matters worse, in Chinese the character 楼 can mean either floor or building (though in the latter case it is often but not always prefixed with 号, eg. 3号楼).

> Why they have to complicate so much something that just works is beyond me.

Probably because it doesn't Just Work(tm) as well as you think. People in general are pretty bad at knowing their actual deliverable address - if you are someone as large as Amazon having even .1% of your packages returned due to user input address errors is likely quite a lot of money.

Having briefly done e-commerce stuff where we had to ship low value product en-masse I tend to think that .1% is a low estimate - but maybe people have gotten better at this since the early 00's.

I'd actually think that with people using GPSs so much of the time using potentially quirky addresses that require some local context would be a bigger problem rather than a lesser one.

When I moved into my house, I effectively had two different addresses that I had to disambiguate based on who I was talking to. As far as the post office was concerned, I lived on Main Street. But a lot of the local maps and local service people thought I lived on North Main Street based on an older street naming convention. At various times, people would tell me I gave them the wrong address.

I once needed to replace an expired health insurance card but since I don't live in the same country where my health insurance is registered, I called the company to inquire about whether it's possible to have the card shipped to another country. Of course it is! Just enter your address into a form in their Easy And Convenient Online System. Turns out, their system wouldn't process the request unless it validated the address. It seems the company paid for a version of the database which contained house-level details from my home country but other countries only had cities listed. That meant I could enter the city and then I could use a dropdown to pick one of the zero streets the system knew about. Suffice to say, I didn't get my health insurance card.

As someone who verifies addresses for a public K-12, that's laughable. New addresses show up all the time and often don't yet appear on the tax parcel site or in the USPS address database, let alone Google Maps. There are entire roads that don't appear in online resources the first month or two that the subdivision is open. There have even been a few roads that were re-addressed and those can take up to year to get updated everywhere.

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