As soon as you start trading with people outside the UK, capturing addresses gets a whole lot more complicated. That's why we've put together a bunch of exciting new services which make capturing international addresses easy and relatively painless.

Address formats vary from country to country - they're even different within the same country if different languages are used! This makes it really hard to get things right and not upset potential customers and this is where we can help. Our new International service gives you access to street level addresses throughout Europe and North America. It doesn't cost the earth and is consistent for each nation. You can't lose!

You probably already know that we have specific services for the UK and US. These provide not only streets but also individual properties so are altogether a bit more swanky. However they are quite specialised and cover only 2 countries whereas our international service covers around 20.

First things first though - international data isn't as detailed as UK data and works differently. In the UK, we're used to entering a postcode and getting a list of properties. This won't work elsewhere. In most countries, a postal code relates to a town or city and will just list the relative streets rather than properties, so the user interface needs to be different. Add to the mix that in many countries, addresses may be listed in multiple languages (and character sets!) you need to be careful.

As you'd expect there are several different ways of using our international service. Each has it's own benefits and limitations but you can mix and match - they all cost the same and you can switch between them as you chose.

• SmartForm™

The Postcode Anywhere SmartForm™ is a revolutionary way to capture addresses on your web site. Using the latest AJAX technologies, it automatically detects the country the customer is in and their language. It presents the address form in their own language and formats the address in the correct format for that country. Plus it's dead easy to implement!
• Auto Complete

This takes the core searching system from SmartForm™ so you can drop it into your own forms. It's completely flexible and easy to implement.
• Web Service

Our web services give you complete control over the user's experience. Available through SOAP, XML over HTTP and AJAX, the web services let you build your own, individual international address capturing system that's seemlessly integrated.

Because of the limitations of the international address data, the user input model is somewhat different. All our web services are designed to follow a basic process:

1. Country for the address is selected.
2. User enters their postal code.
3. The FetchStreets web method is invoked to return the street data for the postcode.
4. As the user enters their street, an autocomplete box is presented for them to pick the address from.
5. Once selected, the street, locality, city and state are completed automatically.

This approach has several benefits: first of all it's the only one that works; secondly, it is "light touch" (we're not sure what that means but it seem appropriate!) - i.e. if we don't have data for the country then the user completes their address without knowing the service exists. However if we do have the data, the auto-completer kicks in and works its magic. This also makes it easier for us to drop in new countries as we receive the data.