Emirates Post Address Validation: How to Use it, Alternative, and More
Did you know that Emirates Post has a network of nearly 109 post offices nationwide? It delivers hundreds and thousands of letters, cards, and packages daily.
However, businesses must ensure they send these mailpieces to the correct delivery addresses. It allows the postal employees to route the mailers properly and ensure low mail returns.
Businesses can leverage Emirates Post address validation to cross-check their customers’ mailing details. It helps them avoid wasting their time, effort, and money over reshipping items that the post office returns due to non-delivery.
This blog discusses everything you need to know about Emirates Post address validation, how it works, its limitations, and much more. Let’s get started!
Key Takeaways
- Emirates Post address validation involves verifying the delivery addresses of mail recipients before shipping. Businesses can use this service to prevent delivery failures, delays, lost items, and misplacements.
- The postal service has many open data files you can download and embed into your system to cross-check addresses. You can also use this service to look up active PO boxes and post office locations.
- Companies that want to standardize and verify mailing addresses in bulk, need geocoding data, or need real-time information, can seek an alternative. Emirates Post does not offer these solutions.
- PostGrid’s Address Verification API lets you get advanced metadata with every address search. It also helps you look up addresses of over 250+ countries and territories.
What is Emirates Post Address Validation?
This process allows businesses to determine whether their customers’ mailing addresses are deliverable and serviceable by Emirates Post. If not, they might have to use an alternative courier service. Otherwise, they can continue shipping after correcting their incorrect or incomplete addresses.
Emirates Post address validation benefits businesses in many ways, including:
- Faster mail deliveries: You can ensure the postal employees complete deliveries promptly when you mention the correct mailing addresses on your mailpieces. They can do their job on time because they don’t have to reroute the items multiple times due to delivery failures and incorrect details.
- Better customer satisfaction: Brands can use address verification to keep up with the estimated arrival times they show customers on their websites. Instead of relying on manual inputs, you can use an online, informative solution to ensure the orders are headed in the correct direction. Thus, you can improve buyer satisfaction by getting them the products they ordered without delays.
- Saved shipping expenses: Emirates Post address validation can help you avoid spending on postage twice. You can cross-check every mailing address before shipping so the post office can complete your mail deliveries on the first attempt instead of returning them.
These advantages prove that businesses need address verification for many reasons, including serving customers and saving money. However, you must know how Emirates Post address validation works to use it correctly and whether it can fulfill all your requirements. Otherwise, you can pair it with another solution, like PostGrid’s Address Verification API, that can verify all national and international addresses hassle-free!
How do You Correctly Write an Address When Shipping Something to the UAE?
When shipping to the UAE, it is crucial to write the address correctly to avoid delays or lost packages. Unlike other countries, the UAE has no traditional postal code system, and home delivery is not always available. Instead, most people and businesses use P.O. boxes to receive mail.
If you are shipping to a P.O. box, the address should look like this:
Recipient Name
Company Name (if applicable)
PO Box [Number]
City, UAE
For example:
Ahmed Ali
ABC Trading LLC
PO Box 12345
Dubai, UAE
The recipient may use a courier service if they do not have a PO box. In this case, you must include a street address and a phone number since couriers often call before delivery. The format may look like this:
Recipient Name
Building Name or Number, Street Name
Neighborhood, City
Phone Number
UAE
For example:
Sara Hassan
Burj Khalifa, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Blvd
Downtown Dubai, Dubai
+971 50 123 4567
UAE
Always check with the recipient before shipping, as some areas do not offer direct home delivery. Some residential areas use “Makani numbers,” a unique location code that can also help ensure accurate delivery. The phone number is crucial for postal deliveries because carriers might need to contact the recipient for directions. Also, confirm with your local postal office if any extra details are required.
How Does Emirates Post Address Validation Work?
Address validation combines many steps that allow you to break down and modify addresses to present the most accurate results. For example, the first step is address autocomplete. It ensures your addresses have complete details, like the street name, city, state, postcode, etc. Autocomplete helps autosuggest correct addresses to users as they enter their details in an address form, like the one they fill out when registering on websites.
Next comes standardization, which allows you to reformat the delivery addresses according to the local post office’s prescribed guidelines. It is crucial to ensure accurate shipping because Emirates Post uses automated sorting machines, like the USPS, to route items. Such equipment typically reads the mailing addresses from the bottom up. Hence, following a specific format is significant when shipping letters or parcels.
The third step is address verification. It helps you find a match for your recipient’s mailing address in an official postal database. Thus, you can mark an address as valid, partially valid, or invalid, and make the necessary modifications to make it deliverable!
However, there’s a catch! Emirates Post address validation does not offer these steps. It has two tools to assist you in verifying your recipients’ mailing data, which are:
Find Post Office Locations
You can find the nearest post office in your neighborhood by downloading one of the open data files that Emirates Post address validation providers. It is a comprehensive list of all the post offices in the UAE, which you can filter by postal zone, location, and post office name. You can also get additional information, like these locations’ working hours and phone numbers.
Find PO Boxes
Businesses can download the list of active PO boxes in the country. It allows them to understand which PO box numbers and locations they can mail to without hassles. Since almost all individuals and companies use PO boxes to receive mail, this facility is crucial for shipping transactional, compliance, and marketing mailpieces.
Though helpful, these tools do not let you enter a delivery address and instantly know whether it is correct. You can only find a local post office to inquire about something and check whether your PO box numbers are accurate. Thus, your staff might need to spend some hours manually calling customers to confirm their addresses or using another method.
Limitations to Emirates Post Address Validation
Does Not Offer Address Verification Per Se
Emirates Post does not provide any actual address validation or verification services. It only offers tools to access open data, such as lists of active PO boxes and a search tool for locating nearby post offices. There is no system to check if an address is correct, deliverable, or associated with a real recipient. Since Emirates Post does not validate addresses in any way, users must rely on other sources to verify address accuracy for deliveries.
No Geocoding Capabilities
The tool does not offer geocoding, meaning it cannot convert addresses into map coordinates or verify their exact locations. Unlike advanced address validation solutions, like PostGrid (which helps you find the latitudes and longitudes), Emirates Post only provides basic postal data. Hence, confirming whether an address is valid or correctly mapped is difficult, leading to challenges in accurate deliveries and location-based services.
Cannot Check Addresses at Scale
Emirates Post address validation does not have a system to check addresses in bulk. Since it only provides open data, like lists of PO boxes and post office locations, businesses cannot use it to confirm whether their mailpieces are going to the correct recipients. Without a way to check addresses at scale, companies that send mail or packages must rely on other sources to ensure their addresses are accurate.
Language and Transliteration Issues
The UAE’s bilingual environment, where Arabic and English are widely used, presents challenges in addressing validation. Address data may be entered in either language or a mix of both, leading to inconsistencies in spelling and transliteration. Variations in how Arabic names are written in English can cause validation mismatches. For example, “Al Barsha” might be written as “Al-Barsha” or “Albarsha,” which could lead to errors in address recognition. The Emirates Post address validation system may struggle to accommodate these linguistic differences, resulting in incorrect address entries and undeliverable mail.
Better Alternative to Emirates Post Address Validation
Since Emirates Post address validation has several drawbacks, businesses might be unable to rely on it for accurate shipping. They should consider an alternative, like PostGrid, to get advanced autocomplete, standardization, and verification solutions.
PostGrid allows you to check addresses in any volume. It can verify up to a million delivery addresses in less than two hours. Thus, you can easily upload your entire mailing list instead of validating them in batches.
The best part is that you can check addresses from any country, not just the UAE. Hence, international businesses that serve customers within and outside the UAE have an all-in-one platform to determine whether their delivery details are correct and complete.
Emirates Post vs PostGrid Address Validation
| Parameters | Emirates Post Address Validation | PostGrid Address Validation |
| Coverage | Emirates Post can only help you cross-check whether a UAE address is correct. | PostGrid allows you to verify addresses from over 250 countries and territories, including the UAE. |
| Address Standardization | It does not reformat addresses according to the post office regulations, leaving this hectic job for your staff to complete manually. | It can standardize addresses according to the destination country’s prescribed formats, ensuring smooth and timely deliveries. |
| API Integration | You cannot integrate Emirates Post address validation into your website. It only allows you to download and use some open data files. | PostGrid offers an advanced, developer-friendly Address Verification API to help you validate addresses across your existing systems. |
| Real-Time Address Verification | It does not provide real-time address checking. | PostGrid combines real-time sources to help you get the most updated results. |
| Bulk Address Validation | Emirates Post address validation does not offer bulk checking. You can only download the PO box data in bulk, which you must cross-reference with your addresses manually. | It provides high-speed, large-volume Address Verification to allow you to verify all mailing addresses in a single run. |
| Pricing | The open data files are free, but not helpful for address validation. | PostGrid’s Address Verification API is highly affordable and allows you to check any number of addresses from any country. |
Why Use PostGrid’s Address Verification Solution for Your Business?
PostGrid is a dedicated tool for helping businesses autocomplete, parse, standardize, and verify delivery addresses. You can integrate its API into your favorite system, such as HubSpot, Marketo, Salesforce, Zapier, etc., and check every address before shipping something. PostGrid takes incomplete, invalid, and inaccurate addresses and returns up-to-date, correct, and deliverable details. Thus, you can confidently ship postcards, letters, flyers, and packages to your customers and other stakeholders.
PostGrid can check addresses globally, ensuring you don’t have to filter customer details by country. You can also save time on reformatting addresses or adding missing information. We use fuzzy logic to identify and correct missing spaces, incorrect abbreviations, typos, misspellings, missing postal codes, etc.
Businesses get many additional features using PostGrid, like geocoding and reverse geocoding. They can convert mailing addresses into geographical coordinates and vice versa, which is crucial for data mapping and making business decisions. Hence, PostGrid’s Address Verification solution is helpful for shipping, marketing, sales, data management, and many other use cases.
Get a demo now to learn more about our Address Verification API and how to get started!
