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Comment by nfRfqX5n | Hacker News Reader

many ways to write the same address. abbreviations, fake unit/apt numbers, apt numbers, etc. try to verify that at the scale of nike or adidas.

ultimately they are selling out inventory so it probably takes a lot of convincing to spend money on a cat and mouse game

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In the US USPS provides this as a service. Every time I put my address in I get asked to use the standardized version.

For bulk shippers the USPS will penalize you if you have... well it was not bad addresses but non-standard addresses. The mail order company I worked for a few years ago put more effort than I expected to normalize and verify addresses met USPS standards. So I guess the penalty made it worth it.

It is the AddressesV3 service. We're planning on using it (for the website redesign) to make sure that the addresses are correct (enough). There's a significant number of people who register and quit/get fired, yet still have to make one final filing (for a state government agency) that we snail-mail them a final "I'm done with this" paper form to fill out. And every couple of years an envelope gets returned as "undeliverable".

https://developers.usps.com/addressesv3

Yeah so does Australia Post. I've dug too deeply but Google Maps on face value seems to provide it as well.

I’ve seen websites say during checkout “your address wasn’t in our db but this one was” showing what was clearly a cleaned up form (changed “Circle” to Cir, uppercased, turned ZIP into ZIP+4) so there are ways.

You would have to tell the user “use the corrected/matched one only” though. Some sites offer the correction but don’t make you use it.

The downside is this service is not up-to-the-minute accurate. I rented a new-construction house and it was the better part of a year before it made it into the USPS address correction database, despite receiving mail just fine.

Might be acceptable collateral damage, but it’d exclude some people.

I think offering suggested edit is ok but requiring the edit be accepted is unwise.

Unfortunately I've had websites strip out the house number in the "cleaned up" address.

Yep this is the right answer, address jigging is the oldest trick in botting. Nowadays with fingerprint browser, generated credit card number and residential proxy, it is very hard to tell legit buyers from scalpers.

I worked for a while at a service company that helped for a few of those issues specifically. It basically served as a back-search against an email address and known connections (social media), and online connections to give it an effective score if it should be manually verified or sidelines into a separate bucket than the general pool.

And even that isn't as icky as a short project I worked on for a major CC company. Still get the icks thinking about it, and I didn't continue beyond the 6mo contract.

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