Delivery Address Verification checks a consumer's shipping address against postal systems to confirm it's a deliverable address — nothing more. It's worth being precise about that limit up front: DAV verifies that an address exists. It does not confirm the person shipping to it lives there.
What to evaluate in a provider
- Geographic coverage across the countries you actually ship to
- How often the underlying address data is refreshed
- Support for mailboxes, PMBs, and suite numbers
- Address cleanup, standardization, and ZIP+4 appending
- Line of Travel (LOT) coding and delivery point bar coding
- Residential vs. business address distinction
- Carrier route codes and advanced name/address parsing
How it's typically used
Real-time verification at checkout is the recommended approach — it lets you prompt the consumer to correct the address on the spot rather than discovering a bad address after the order ships. Some services go further and auto-correct formatting and standardize multi-unit details.
Cost and implementation
Service bureaus typically charge per transaction; software-based services run on a monthly or quarterly subscription. It's also possible to build this in-house with purchased address data, or check manually against USPS — viable at low volume, but doesn't scale.