Postal Address Finder -09 October 2018

What is a Postal Address Finder (PAF)

3X Software has been a Value Added Reseller of the Royal Mail Database for many years and now offers an online service under the trading name of Postcods4u. Royal Mail has developed a constantly updated database of postcode and address details, which relates to England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands. In addition, there are over one million named organisations held. The Postal Address File (PAF) comprises a list of these addresses and their postcodes. Using a online service to lookup an address from a postcode ensures that you are using the most up to date address data and the address is captured accurately.

The basic data is supplied by Royal Mail, and, as a Value Added Reseller, 3X Software has taken that basic data and created addressing files for use on other platforms like the IBM System i (AS/400), along with software to maintain and distribute it on a periodic basis. Over 36,000 UK businesses from all sectors and of all sizes rely on PAF® These include leading Banks, Insurance Companies, Supermarkets, Government departments and the Police, online retailers, Entertainment venues, Charities and a host of Premiership Football Teams. The database is especially useful to Financial service industries, call centers and mail order companies.

postcode finder

PAF is an invaluable tool for creating and maintaining mailing-lists and databases, helping you to reduce the number of returned or undelivered items, sharpen your customer profiling, and improve customer satisfaction.

With PAF you can sort your mail with full and correct Postcodes, which could help reduce your postage costs. Our system allows both postcode and address generation, depending on user requirements.

By using the system you can:

Reduce keying time
Standardise address formatting
Reduce errors
Find company addresses

Reduce delivery costs by ensuring the goods are delivered to the correct address first time

The data can bus used for:

validating addresses
improving response to direct mail
efficiency of inbound call centres
speeding-up online transactions
mapping and geo-demographics
credit rating.

To ease interfacing, APIs are provided which may be called to provide the following functions:

Return an address from a given postcode
Search on street name, with the ability to select a premise
Translate the address from uppercase to lowercase
Search on part of an organisation name

PAF/400 is native to the IBM System i but we can provide the data to other platforms just contact us for more details.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday -11 September 2018

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.

Black Friday Cyber Monday

nopCommerce free address lookup plugin -11 September 2018

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/

Contact Form 7 -11 September 2018

Following feedback and requests from our customers we have made considerable changes to our Contact form 7 to make it even better.

It allows Postcode Address Lookup to be added to your WooCommerce Checkout pages as well as Contact Form 7 and Gravity Form pages. Also allows multiple forms

Easy integration into any other WordPress Page.

Also includes our own customisable Contact Form with Postcode lookup that can be added to any of your pages.

You can download here using this link:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/postcodes4u-address-finder/

Voted Website of the Month -22 August 2018

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/ …

No Royal Mail Increase from Postcodes4u -27 June 2018

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.

Prepare your Ecommerce Store For Black Friday -08 November 2017

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge opportunities for any ecommerce trader. Last year the total spend on online retail sites on Black Friday was £1.23 BILLION so it’s no surprise that this year more websites are set to get involved than ever before! If you’re one of these websites are you prepared?

Reduce Your Cart Abandonment Rate With This One Simple Fix -05 December 2016

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.

How to Improve E-commerce Customer Satisfaction -15 November 2016

According to the Office of National Statistics most recent figures the UK’s e-commerce sales were £668.9 billion rising by over 29 billion from 2018.

Many businesses have started trading online or increased their focus on e-commerce as a response to the pandemic in the last few years. But with so many businesses now online we need to make sure that customer satisfaction is taken into account to ensure repeat custom.

What impacts customer satisfaction?

Many things impact customer satisfaction in e-commerce such as how easy your site is to use, the price and quality of your products and your customer service. Most of those things are completely within your control which is great news as you can put strategies in place to improve customer satisfaction straight away.

However, e-commerce businesses still need to post out products which is where hand over the control and put our trust in the postal system to safely deliver our customers items. Which is sometimes where things go wrong.

Customer Satisfaction and Delivery

Delivery has a big impact on customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, as the Royal Mail say on their own website, “sometimes things go wrong”. Even though the delivery part of our business is often out of our hands consumers will still leave with a bad taste in their mouth if they have a bad experience when trying to receive their purchases.

And can you blame them? Is there anything more infuriating than getting excited to receive your order and it taking longer than you expected because of delivery problems or even lost?!

Why do deliveries go wrong?

In Royal Mail’s defence, they perform a thankless task. There are a myriad of things that may go wrong in the delivery process. One of the biggest causes of mis-deliveries is incorrect addresses. Addresses can be complicated to format, especially in the UK and if written or formatted incorrectly it can easily cause post to go missing.

In 2019 the Royal Mail received over 578,000 complaints. That’s a lot of post that’s gone missing and a massive impact on e-commerce businesses. But the good news is that even though you can’t hand deliver all of your items yourself there are some easy ways you can maximise the chances of a successful delivery.

How can Postcodes4U Help?

One simple way to minimise this problem and increase customer satisfaction is by using an address lookup service in your checkout process so that customers can provide a validated delivery address in a trusted, official format. Postcodes4U can help you do just that. We use 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.

We have plugins available for most e-commerce platforms to install immediately and you can get started with 30 free search credits. You can also contact us if you need a custom integration created for you completely free of charge.

So get in touch and don’t hesitate to make this easy change that could drastically improve your customer satisfaction.

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