Address Verification

Posta Romana Address Validation

Address Validation

Posta Romana Address Validation: Benefits, Disadvantages and Alternative

As per a study by Progress, wrong address data can cost a business 15% to 25% of its revenue. This equates to over $400 billion in losses for industries like banks. Moreover, the inability to verify premises before sending letters, packages, and other mail items can lead to failed delivery. This negatively impacts the customer experience. Keeping these worldwide data in mind, Posta Romana, Romania’s national postal service provider, designed address validation features. In this blog, we will go over what they offer and their benefits. We will explain why your mail is undelivered in Romania and the acceptable format. We will also look at the disadvantages of this solution and why you should choose PostGrid. 

Address Validation

Key Takeaways

  • Lack of address validation can lead to a significant loss of money and customers, especially for businesses in industries like ecommerce, banks, and financial institutions.
  • Posta Romana offers a Search ZIP Code and Find a Post Office solution. They help the user find the postal code and the office by entering the details.
  • They are easy-to-use tools that comply with Romanian rules and regulations. Providing accurate ZIP codes can help prevent misdelivery to some extent.
  • You cannot seek their help for detailed verification. It lacks standardization, autocomplete suggestions, and other aspects needed to check that the details are correct, complete, and deliverable.
  • PostGrid Address Verification is a feature-rich tool for verifying and formatting information in real-time. It also provides type-ahead, relevant autocomplete suggestions, and rooftop geocodes.

What is Posta Romana Address Validation Solution?

Posta Romana offers a solution to help address validation, mainly through its Search ZIP Code and Find a Post Office features. Users can find a postal code and office by adding the locality, county, and street name. If the place is in a small town or a rural locality, you don’t have to type the name of the locality. Such areas will have one ZIP code, regardless of the address. You can also search for the information through a postal code, which will provide details like county, city, street name and number, and postal unit. While these features help check and format the information, they do not offer comprehensive validation services. 

Why is Your Mail Undelivered to a Romanian Address?

Incorrect or Incomplete Address Information

You might not have added important components like street name, building number, and locality. In the urban areas of Romania, the addresses must include special identifiers like staircase, block number, and apartment number. Forgetting to add these details can confuse the agent, leading to misdelivery. 

If you send mail to a rural area, adding unclear directions or missing elements like village names can make it difficult for the postal service to locate the address. Posta Romana cannot check whether or not the details are complete; hence, you need a third-party tool to ensure completeness. 

Wrong or Missing ZIP Code

The Romanian postal system relies heavily on ZIP codes for sorting and routing mail to the correct location. Adding a wrong code or missing it altogether can send the mail to the wrong area or delay processing. You can use Posta Romania’s Search ZIP Code solution to find out the code of a particular address.

Change of Address Without Notification

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people in Romania change their location. However, they either fail to update it in the database or set up a mail forwarding system. This leads to postal service providers delivering letters and packages to the old residence. The new occupant might not acknowledge them or might discard them. Under Posta Romania, you can request redirection service when changing residences. If you cannot set this up, your package will not be sent or will return with the “Addressee Unknown” status.

What is the Correct Format for Writing a Romanian Address?

The first step to prevent the misdelivery of your package in Romania is ensuring that the format is acceptable, both domestically and internationally. Romania is a member of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), which sets the rules for international mail exchange, including how to write the address. As per UPU, you must follow the format below to ensure accurate delivery.

  1. First Line: Write the recipient’s name and an honorific title, such as “Domnul” for Mr., “Doamna” for Mrs., or “Domnisoara” for Miss. 
  2. Second Line: Write the street name. If the person uses a P.O. box, write “C.P.” (Cutie Poștală is Romanian for P.O. box).
  3. Third Line: Write the six-digit postal code along with the name of the city or town where the person lives.
  4. Fourth Line: Write the name of the country. If you are sending international mail to Romania, we recommend capitalizing all the elements for clarity and legibility. The address on a package sent to a Romanian place will look like this.
DOMNUL EDWARD SMITH

STRADA UNIRII 56

0210304 BUCHAREST

ROMANIA

Benefits of Using Posta Romana Address Validation Solution

Reduce Delivery Failure

The solution ensures that you have the correct postal codes. This increases the possibility of accurate mail delivery through the Posta Romana network. This will reduce costs associated with reshipping and reprocessing the returned packages. Moreover, the Find a Post Office feature connects the address with a known, operational office. This helps confirm that the location exists and that the institution can receive the mail.

Easy to Use

This tool is free to use, and anyone can utilize it regardless of their technical expertise. All you need to do is visit the official website of Postal Romana, head over to the Search ZIP Code page, and start typing the details. You don’t have to create an account and pay for basic functionalities. However, since it provides limited information, you must invest in a third-party tool like PostGrid Address Verification to cross-check every component.

Compliant With Local Standards

Romania’s businesses must adhere to strict postal requirements for business mail, legal documents, and government correspondence. The Search ZIP Code tool ensures that the details meet the national postal standards, preventing regulatory issues or non-compliance. 

Shortcomings of Posta Romana Address Validation Solution

Limited to ZIP Code Lookup

It will only confirm or help identify the ZIP code of the locality or the street. There can be multiple streets within a ZIP code and numerous houses on each street. It will not check whether the street name exists or whether the apartment, floor, or suite number is accurate. With this, even if the postal address is correct, the package may get sent to an incorrect or non-existent house number. Businesses need to maintain an accurate customer database. Incomplete validation can lead to lower data quality, affecting operations and customer satisfaction.

No API Integration

You cannot integrate this into your CRM, checkout, or order management platforms. Your staff must manually verify each detail by visiting the Posta Romana website. This will result in a time-consuming, erroneous, and inefficient process. Moreover, the lack of API will make scaling labor-intensive. This will slow down order processing when you have to verify batches of them. 

Additionally, without an API, businesses will face challenges in standardizing the details across various platforms. This will result in data inconsistencies, poor-quality records, and duplicate addresses. 

Impractical Bulk Validation

You must manually verify every detail by typing the components in this solution. While doing the process for a handful of addresses can be easy, businesses generally have an extensive database of customers. It will become a massive task that will take up all your time. Additionally, doing it manually will leave room for errors. This can lead to misdelivery and returned packages, thus wasting significant money.

Does Not Verify International Addresses

It only offers a ZIP code lookup facility for places within Romania. Therefore, when sending packages abroad, you cannot confirm whether the information is accurate, complete, and deliverable. This increases the risk of errors such as misspelled street names or non-existent addresses. It can delay the delivery or cause the package to be lost or returned. 

No Real-Time Validation

Without entry point validation, your business cannot immediately detect and correct the errors as the customer enters the details. Mistakes like typos and missing apartment numbers will easily slip through. Moreover, without instant feedback, you must manually check and validate the information after receiving the orders. Imagine doing this repeatedly for hundreds and thousands of addresses. 

Additionally, newly built areas and housing developments may not appear immediately in the Posta Romana solution. This will lead to undelivered parcels, which frustrate customers and cause them to leave negative reviews or complaints, damaging your company’s reputation.

Does Not Offer Autocomplete Suggestions

You must manually enter every element since no real-time or type-ahead autocomplete service exists. This increases the possibility of misspelled street names or apartment numbers, leading to delivery failure, returns, and irritated customers.  

A Better Alternative: PostGrid Address Verification

Postal Romana’s address validation solution’s limitations are a significant obstacle to ensuring data quality accuracy. You need a holistic solution like the one we provide. It verifies, standardizes, validates, and autocompletes the details according to the respective country’s postal standards. It has broad coverage, whether your clients live in Romania, the US, Canada, Australia, or any other country. Let us now look at some of the features of PostGrid that give it an upper hand. 

Parameters PostGrid Address Verification Postal Romana Address Validation
Primary Job It offers parsing, standardization, verification, validation, and autocomplete. It checks every element, including street type, name, city, state, ZIP code, building, floor, and apartment number. It only provides a lookup to confirm the accuracy of the ZIP codes and find the post office corresponding to the county and city.
Geographic Reach You can check addresses for over 245 countries and territories, including Romania. The solution is limited to checking Romanian ZIP codes and finding post offices.
Real-Time Autocomplete Suggestions As the user types the address, it provides real-time and geolocation-based autocomplete suggestions. It does not offer such services.
Batch Processing You can verify over one million addresses in one go by uploading a file with the customer’s details. You will have to manually enter the details, one at a time, to check whether the ZIP code exists. 
API Integration You can integrate the API with your checkout page, CRM, or any tool to check the accuracy. It will verify the details as the customer types.  You cannot use it as a customer-facing tool. You will have to collect the details from the customer and visit the website whenever you want to check a ZIP code.
Address Standardization It will automatically break down and re-format the provided information as per the postal standards of the respective country, whether it is Romania, the USA, Canada, etc. It does not standardize the details. However, it provides guidelines for correctly formatting Romanian addresses.
Compliance and Security Depending on the region, it ensures data compliance and security per HIPAA, SOC-2, PIPEDA, GDPR, CCPA, and more. It is only compliant with the rules and regulations of Romania.
Geocoding Aside from forward and reverse geocoding, it also offers rooftop coordinates. These are the latitude and longitude of the roof of the building where your customers live, enhancing delivery accuracy. The results vary for each postal code and office. For some, it might provide details up to the street name or number, and others, until the building number. This inconsistency can pose challenges in delivery. 
Transliteration It returns a verified address in the language of your choice.  The address details are only available in Romanian.
Delivery Point Validation It will check if the elements, down to the apartment or suite number, can accept the parcel or not. It merely provides basic details, such as the city, street, and post office name, regardless of whether the address is deliverable.

Choose PostGrid to Verify Addresses Within and Beyond Romania

You don’t have to limit yourself to verifying addresses solely based on ZIP codes and post offices. Our solution will check every element. It will return a verified, standardized address and real-time autocomplete suggestions for countries worldwide. This will ensure accurate delivery and proper communication with clients and customers. To see us in action, request a demo now.