Postcode Anywhere & Irish Eircode Post Codes

Postcode Anywhere have made Ireland’s first public postal code system, known as Eircodes, available on their address validation service, Capture+.

Unlike other countries, where postcodes define clusters or groups of addresses, an Eircode will identify an individual address – rural or urban – and help show exactly where it is located.

Currently, 35% of the addresses used by Ireland’s 4.5 million inhabitants are not unique. Deliveries are therefore dependent on the local knowledge of postal workers. The introduction of Eircodes will not only will it make the delivery of services and goods to households easier, but in the case of an emergency, being able to accurately and quickly identify an address can save valuable minutes.

Guy Mucklow, CEO of Postcode Anywhere, believes that the introduction of postcodes will bring significant benefits to the country’s economy.

Having a complete address database is an essential part of managing an efficient economy. Besides the obvious improvements to delivery, addresses and particularly structured, postcoded addresses are the key to providing the information for the planning and delivery of health, social and education services by local and national government.

Guy said “We have many business customers who sell into the Irish market and have never had the data to provide them with the level of service that they require. I am delighted that this is now changing, however, unless the data is widely exposed through services such as Capture+, then it will remain of limited value as people will have little incentive to remember their complete address”.

Unlike traditional address capture solutions where the user searches for their address by typing in a postcode at the point of checkout, Capture+ allows users to type in the first line of their address and the software will provide addresses matching that first line to choose from. Similar to predictive typing in search engines, the application predicts what you are searching for and changes accordingly as you continue to type.

Eircode data is currently more expensive than other datasets on the market but Capture+ customers who top up online can use Eircodes for six months at no extra cost in an introductory offer by Postcode Anywhere.

For more information on Eircodes and Capture+, or to find out more about Postcode Anywhere’s other address validation services, the Postcode Anywhere website has further details.

Will marketplaces enforce Eircode usage?

The one question we’d love to have a positive answer to, is will marketplaces (especially eBay and Amazon) force all Irish users to update their addresses to include the new Eircode? Currently eBay have no address verification in place and I’ve never known them to force a mass address verification against a service such as Postcode Anywhere or Royal Mail’s PAF file.

Verifying each and every address on marketplaces next time an item is shipped is something every seller would welcome. Whilst it would add a certain amount of friction for sales, it would be a one time issue and doubtless a check could be made for compliant addresses and only those whose address was in question would need to go through the verification process.