In this webinar, our international address expert Bryan Amundson went over the ins and outs of international address data. He gave details about country designators, transliteration, and other localized things to consider when working with international addresses. He also dove into how to tell how accurate your international data is and other international address hacks you didn't learn in primary school.

What is an International Address?

An international address is any address outside the country relative to your geographic location or the location of a specific business or entity. Many address data tools are available, and many list "US Addresses" separate from "International Addresses" since they’re based in the US.

When is it useful to have this sort of database? Really any time you’re dealing with addresses in more than one country.

One benefit to international address datasets is that you'll often include the entire planet in your tool. If you’re mailing anything 'internationally,' you'll want an international address validation tool.

Country Designators

There are more country designations than just the country's name.

For example:

Name:
ISO-2
ISO-3
ISO-N
Great Britain:
GB
GBR
826

Every request against an international address validation tool will require the Country field to be provided. Most tools require that you use their specific country designator of choice, which can be difficult if you’re not sure what that designation is.

In the example above for Great Britain, an address tool may require the ISO-3 for all requests, but you might only know the name or the ISO-2.

Smarty is flexible with this field (unlike the address validation API provided by a company that rhymes with Schmoogle, which only allows ISO-2). We accept all four positive country designators. So what you have will work.

What is Address Transliteration?

Simply put, address transliteration is the conversion between non-Latin and Latin characters. Some carriers require addresses to be in Latin characters.

You'll have a hard time understanding a foreign address's meaning, especially if the language uses different characters from the ones you’re familiar with. Doing a lookup against Smarty’s international address database can get you all sorted out in no time flat.

If a query is given in the native language, the API can give back the native result or the Latin result.

The same goes if you give an address in a Latin language; it’ll return a Latin result.

It's important to note also that the API can be programmed to deliver whatever result you specify, "native" or "Latin."

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View the Full Webinar Recording Here

This is but a taste of what Bryan covered in the webinar. You can view the full recording here.