
Free Address Verification by EasyPost - jstreebin
http://blog.geteasypost.com/post/40684464899/free-address-verification
======
scoot
Is it safe to assume that the developers have forgotten that there's a very
big world beyond the US borders? The title doesn't say so, the blog post
doesn't either, and the website makes no reference to the countries supported.
But as the API doesn't take a country field, it's the only conclusion I can
come to.

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jstreebin
No! We're a US company so that's where we're starting but we'll be working on
international next.

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scoot
Then please make that clear in your blog post and home-page.

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jstreebin
Added to homepage (bottom right)

Added to blog post

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scoot
Belatedly - thank you. Good to see feedback being acted on.

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callmeed
IDEA: Stripe + EasyPost for an EBay that doesn't suck or price-gouge. You put
stuff up for sale/auction, the payments go straight to your Stripe account and
shipping is calculated/charged fairly. Emulate AirBnB for handling trust
issues (reviews, email/phone verification and social graph connections).

Start with a niche like used Apple products.

~~~
jstreebin
I like it!

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marcrosoft
I am curious how you guys are getting around the terms of use of the carriers
especially address validation as it strictly forbids serving that information
for others not associated with the developer key.

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elarsen
I would really like to know the answer to this. If they are just turning
around and hitting USPS data for this, then last I checked, they are violating
the TOS. Even if you have your own account, you can only use the address
validation IF you are also going to ship to that address with USPS.

Perhaps they are using some other address validation service/data that allows
for it.

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JosephRedfern
Hmm... Does this validate that the address exists, or that an individual lives
at that address? Just because someone has entered the incorrect address
doesn't mean that the address doesn't exist.

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jstreebin
It validates that the address itself is valid and you can mail items to it

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hncommenter13
To be clear, is this CASS/DPV-style validation? Is it certified CASS/DPV? If
so, that would be awesome. Any info on usage limits for the free tier, etc?
Can we use this for address verification only or is it required to purchase as
well?

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jstreebin
Indeed it is! And there's no usage limits

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toomuchtodo
What's the preferred request rate to be polite?

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joncalhoun
For testing - try to keep it reasonable (a few req/s).

If you are worried about exceeding our limits in production (via bulk or your
site has that much traffic) feel free to email us: contact@geteasypost.com

~~~
toomuchtodo
Well within what I was planning (1 request per minute).

Thank you!

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dminor
It's nice to see startups tackling shipping APIs - they really are ugly.

What I'd _really_ like to see is something that reaches down to the inventory
level, I.e. I'm shipping these 5 SKUs, what's the best price among the
carriers I support.

It's a complex problem (from experience) but it would provide real value to
smaller shops who want to implement economy shipping but don't want to deal
with all the APIs.

~~~
joncalhoun
The idea is awesome, but handling products via a SKU is hard. For instance, if
you had the SKU 517030000077284 (a Gibson Les Paul) how would you determine
the package size that each customer individually uses? Or determine how much
extra weight was added by packaging to keep the guitar safe?

I would love to solve this problem but it is definitely a hard one to solve.

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dminor
Like I said, it's complex - for our internal solution we just queried for
rates for all of our box sizes, and then our software suggests the cheapest it
thinks will fit, but allows the warehouse guy to override it. It has a really
simple formula for "learning" when he chooses something different.

A general solution would be much harder, but if it had existed we would have
forked over money without too much thought.

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tbrooks
Looks like Shipping/Postage APIs are about to heat up:

<https://www.postmaster.io/>

~~~
marcrosoft
I doubt it. Carrier terms of service make the SaaS model for this difficult if
not impossible. I also don't understand why anyone would pay a percentage per
label when the carriers offer free APIs. Sure the APIs are a pain but there
are good libraries out there for them.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I could see people using this to get up and running quickly, but then flushing
out their system to integrate directly with carriers once size dictates.

Example: DailyCred lets you drop in authentication on your site, but when you
get big enough (or have the time resources), you can dump out the bcrypted
password hashes into your own built-out auth system.

MVP/Prototype->Iterate->Grow. These services that are reducing pain points let
you get the first parts done fast, so you can get to the growth stage faster.

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ssi1111
I think you should have a form where users can try out your address checks.
This is just so devs can quickly make sure if you know the difference between
good and a bad address before they try out the api.

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joncalhoun
If you want to try some out via curl it is pretty quick. See
<https://www.geteasypost.com/docs#addresses>

I do agree tho and a quick form to test out all of the APIs is in the works so
users can quickly see what the API will return.

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magic5227
What are the units here? Says -d 'parcel[length]=10.0' \ -d
'parcel[width]=5.0' \ -d 'parcel[height]=8.0' \ -d 'parcel[weight]=100.0'

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jstreebin
Those are ounces and inches

<https://www.geteasypost.com/docs#parcels>

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magic5227
thanks

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ericcholis
Does EasyPost support negotiated rates? Many larger shippers have negotiated
special rates with the various carriers.

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jstreebin
We're working on that! Once we integrate UPS and FedEx that will be an option

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Jemaclus
What's the source of this data? USPS? Fedex? UPS? Google? A hamster with a
video camera?

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funthree
The example doesnt really work

    
    
        $ curl https://www.geteasypost.com/api/address/verify \
        >   -u cueqNZUb3ldeWTNX7MU3Mel8UXtaAMUi: \
        >   -d 'address[street1]=388 Townsend St' \
        >   -d 'address[street2]=Apt 20' \
        >   -d 'address[zip]=94107'
    
        <html><body>You are being <a href="http://www.geteasypost.com/api/address/verify">redirected</a>.</body></html>

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bpartridge
This is because their demo uses https, as recommended in their documentation
("We suggest that you make API requests over HTTPS..."). But, if you switch to
using the http protocol, the request will return a response correctly. It's a
bug.

Also interesting because their website redirects http requests to the https
protocol (eg. <http://geteasypost.com/docs>).

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jstreebin
Yes, sorry about that. It's fixed so both work now

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bpartridge
Great, thanks!

