Making your website easier with a postcode address lookup

[chrisomatic]

Tweet

Hi all, bit of an odd one this but bear with me.

After working a few years in eCommerce I decided to go it alone and I am launching an online shop soon...the company I used to work for used a pirated copy of the PAF which Royal Mail charges a fortune for. I didn't want to do that.

A quick Google will get you loads of sites eager to get you to pay them a few pennies per search. The quality of their service looks good but I wondered if it was possible to do it another way and my eCommerce project was put on hold for a few days while I did some experiments in making a solution that was perhaps not quite as good as a paid solution but for "free" (took me quite a few hours!) was a good compromise.

Postcode based address lookup DEMO ONLY

Why am I putting this here? Well, I did it a month ago but I've since shown it to friends who actually find the data quite good. I have also just had a little interest from one of the postcode address lookup companies who said the data is quite good!

I am not for one second saying the data is perfect or it's good enough to use but I thought I'd put this out there for the people that run eCommerce websites to comment on.

I don't make any money from it nor is it my business but something I kinda stumbled across that I thought was worth pursuing for a few hours.

Thanks - Chris

[chrisomatic]

I hope no one minds me following this up but it is still the last post in this section. I had a positive response (not without some bug complaints which I sorted) so have now presented as a service here Free postcode software for websites & businesses by tabcat It's free.

[poohda]

hi, how to get the API key?...i have contact them using the contact form in the website but no reply.

Thanks.