We’re passionate about postcodes at Postcodes4U. And why wouldn’t we be? Postcodes make delivering post even more efficient and they’re an easy way to look up and address in the UK. Just try out our free quick postcode lookup. 

Here are 25 fun facts about postcodes that you might not know. You never know one of them might come up in the next quiz you take part in.

1. The Queen has a unique postcode for Buckingham Palace, SW1A 1AA.

2. Even Father Christmas has his own postcode so he can receive all those sacks of Christmas lists. It is SAN TA1 (in Canada it’s HOH OHO ...) and letters sent to this postcode actually do arrive.

3. London was the first city to see the beginnings of post coding. In 1857 it was divided into 10 postal districts based on compass points: N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW, EC for East Central and WC for West Central.

4. Nowadays NE stands for Newcastle and S for areas of South Yorkshire and Derbyshire around Sheffield.

5. Liverpool was the first provincial town to be divided into postal districts in 1864, followed by Manchester.

6. Numbers were first added to the postal districts to create ‘sub-districts’ in 1917 to help the woman who took over the sorting work while the men were fighting in the First World War.

7. It wasn’t until 1959, when the post office began to experiment with sorting machines, that Norwich was selected to trial modern post codes. 150,000 addresses received a code of NOR followed by two digits and a letter.

8. The late, great Labour minister Tony Benn was the Postmaster General who decided to extend the postcode system to the whole of the UK in 1965.

9. The eight-year programme to create a postcode for every home in the country began in Croydon 1966 and finished 40 years ago in 1974 with the recoding of Norwich.

10. The postcode HD7 5UZ in Huddersfield, West Yorks, covers seven streets, more than any other in the UK.

11. In 2008 Liverpool and England star Steven Gerrard built a new two storey gym in his back garden in the Merseyside suburb of Freshfield. It was so big it had a different postcode to his house.

12. Britain is one of seven post coding systems in the world that use an alphanumeric system - a combination of letter and numbers - which allows a greater number of unique combinations to be used.

13. The combination of letters and numbers was also chosen because people can remember a mixture of numbers and letters more easily than a list of numbers.

14. Optical recognition machines read the postcodes and automatically convert them to phosphor dots. These are in turn read by the sorting machines which handle correctly addressed mail, post-coded letters 20 times faster than manual sorting.

15. The Girobank at Bootle in Liverpool was given its own postcode, GIR 0AA, that did not fit into the standard, geographical system. The postcode was taken over by its successors Alliance & Leicester and is currently used by Santander.

16. In comedy Red Dwarf, the space ship is the size of a city, and has the fictional postal address complete with postcode: Red Dwarf, Deep Space, RE1 3DW.

17. The furthest point from the sea in the UK is Church Flatts farm near the village of Coton in the Elms, which lies in the DE12 postcode area in Derbyshire.

18. The British Forces Post Office has its own postcode, BF.

19. Postcodes have been adopted by countries around the world and 117 of the 190 countries in the Universal Postal Union have postcode systems.

20. In India they are known as PIN (standing for Postal Index Number) codes, and in the United States as ZIP (Zone Improvement Plan) codes.

21. One of the most famous zip codes is Beverly Hills 90210 - the same as a teen TV show. It is also one of the wealthiest areas in the US.

22. Countries without postcodes include Jamaica, Ghana and Hong Kong.

23. The Royal Mail uses the imaginary postcode prefix FX for training purposes.

24. Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford, East London, is so big it has its own postcode, E20, which was previously the fictional location for BBC soap EastEnders.

25. There is no danger of the UK running out of postcodes anytime soon. The current alpha-numeric system has enough potential combinations to create 48million postcodes.

Try out our free quick address lookup and if you’re an e-commerce business we can provide integrations to ensure you always have the correct customer address saving you time and money in your business. Find out more here and get started today with 30 free search credits.

What is a Postal Address Finder (PAF)

It's never too early to start planning for Balck Friday and Cyber Monday

With online retail’s busiest day of the year approaching make sure your business is ready by topping up your Postcodes4U credits!!
Log in to your account over at www.postcodes4u.co.uk and find a price package that suits you.

Do you have a #nopcommerce website? If so we provide a free address lookup plugin for all versions of Nop http://plugins.3xsoftware.co.uk/

We are thrilled to be have been chosen as website of the month from @HeartInternet Many thanks https://www.heartinternet.uk/blog/website-of-the-month-july-2018-postcodes4u/ …

Royal Mail are putting up their PAF prices on 1st July by 5% BUT we are NOT passing on the increase to you!

We are committed to trying to provide the best value to our customers. 

Royal Mail have quoted "Continued changes to the mix of End User licensing and increased costs mean that we need to review our prices to ensure that we can continue to maintain PAF® accuracy and data quality"

This year we have decided NOT to pass on the increase to you so you can carry on with your business without worrying about increased cost. 

Please remember if you need any help integrating our service just contact us and our team are only too happy to help.

For most e-Commerce businesses, a chief concern is how to convert visitors into customers. The average cart abandonment rate is around 70 and it’s the eternal headache for e-commerce businesses. Watching customers go halfway through the process only to abandon their purchase. 

So how can we minimise this and make sure that we get more customer to the sales finish line?

There are many ways to reduce the likelihood of cart abandonment but ultimately all our efforts are to make the customer experience as easy and frictionless as possible. It’s suggested that checkout optimisation can reduce cart abandonment by around 35% and an address validation service like the one Postcodes4U provides is a great way to do that. 

Read on to find out why it can be an easy but effective way to optimise your customer’s checkout experience and reduce cart abandonment rate. 

 1. Makes it Easy and Quick

The more work you leave your customers to do, the less likely they are to complete it. Some addresses can be long and complicated to fill in, especially if the address fields aren’t set out properly. It might not seem like a big task but remember that we want to make the checkout process as easy as possible.

Having an address lookup service integrated in your checkout process to fill in the form automatically reduces work for your customer, making it less likely that they will lose interest and abandon their purchase. 

2. Builds confidence

The more confident a customer feels that a delivery will be successful the more likely they’ll be to complete the checkout process and make their purchase. Knowing that their address is automatically filled in in a format that will be validated and recognised by delivery services is reassuring to customers as they know it’s less likely their parcel will go missing. 

3. Shows Authenticity

If your checkout forms fail to build trust and credibility, it’s likely that you’re losing out on a lot of potential business. Many people, even in this day and age when e-commerce is so widespread, can be nervous providing their personal and financial details over the internet. A postcode lookup service can be a really simple way to reduce this fear and show customers that you are credible and authentic.

In particular if you use Postcode4U’s service that utilises the Postcode Address File (PAF®) from the Royal Mail which is the most up-to-date and complete address database in the UK containing over 31 million addresses. The Royal Mail is a trusted institution known to everyone in the UK. 

How Postcodes4u can help:

Installing an address lookup service is a simple way to ease the friction of the checkout process and reduce cart abandonment rates maximising sales and growing your business. Postcodes4U address validation services can help you do just that. 

Get started now with 30 free search credits. 

Find the right plugin for your e-commerce platform or get in touch to find out more.