Trade Me still allows fake addresses

I dont use book a courier. BAC is too slow for high volume selling so I havent tried that to see how they deal with that situation. What I mean is trade me allows users to manipulate the address by making up a post code, there for getting imported to eship (nzpost) as an urban address, when the address is incorrectly formatted to avoid rural charges. The buyer selects urban shipping.  You should not be allowed to edit the post code, and only be allowed to use the post code provided on say NZ Post website.  If they dont let rural charges get through BAC, then they must have some address verification at that point. They should apply that to all addresses entered on trade me. 

Jakob, Trademe don't do any address verification before or during the BAC process. NZ Post & Aramex do when the address is sent to them for the quoting process in BAC, hence why often addresses are not recognised by one or the other couriers and you only get one company quote returned.

I use other booking systems and they pull the buyers address the buyer has selected, then check that. If something is not correct, they throw the address out and you have to put it in manually or by using an auto-complete. If a post code for a particular street address is not correct, the booking company should be flagging that at the time the booking is made and not letting it go through until correct. If they are simply working from the postcode, then their system is flawed.

As far as Trademe allowing incorrect addresses to be input manually, then it get's a bit hard as postcode boundaries and address areas change often and sometimes it is necessary to input an address manually. I have had to edit addresses manually that NZ Post even get's wrong on their own address check system.

Yeah it is definitely flawed, but could be avoided if like on my simple woocommerce website, TM had an address verifier.. I agree that NZ Post should double check it, but sometimes they slide through, and if they do, they then bill me for it. In the past they have always credited it, but today, they arent budging and as usual squeezing every drop out of small businesses for their verification issues. Interesting that none can get through BAC though. 

Yeah, in fact you can manually enter addresses to get through the BAC system with an address that NZ Post or Aramex don't recognise, but it's usually that NZ Post don't recognise it as their system seems to be much more picky that the Aramex one is, hence if using BAC you sometimes only get an Aramex quote and when you go back and edit the address suddenly NZ Post pops back up again.

Lol, just to show how frequent these changes are, I just did a booking manually as was a sale from elsewhere and buyer gave me a postcode that didn't look quite right for the area to me. When I put address in for the booking it came up with what looked to be the correct postcode. I clicked in to the postcode on the NZ Post lookup site and it says the area this covers was last modified 18/3/2023, so, it's quite recent.

Kia Ora All,

I entered the street name of a Rural address into my send address's yesterday - the TM system brought me up an address which included the correct Post code But No RD number & Not the right mailing Suburb/Town 

When I Manually entered the address inputting the RD number the TM system changed the RD to Rd which is the abbreviation for Road Not Rural Delivery - Everytime I changed it to RD and saved it the TM system changed it back to Rd - The TM system wouldn't accept RD until I entered it as R.D.

With this I looked up the correct mailing address through TM's address lookup link which took me to NZ Post website - the NZ Post website provided a completely different Town to which TM gave me - Go figure! And the accepted Rural Delivery was RD - Not R.D.

Now I could have just selected the TM site address that came up and I wouldn't have had an RD in place either! - I know Better!

Yes! the TM site needs to pick up this RD factor so Buyers are sending the correct address through - the TM site also needs to set the system to accept RD in place of R.D. so when Sellers are copying the address over to the shipping company they go through rather than come back as invalid address due to the full stops ..

This is Not always a Buyer avoiding Rural Delivery costs - Remember here the TM system picked me up an address based on the street number and name I entered - Not everyone will be scrutinising the address TM provides especially when the Post code is a Match!

- Cheers.

Many buyers do not know their post code correctly, particularly prevalent for rural dwellers. I'm not sure how this is possible as NZ changed the postcodes back in 2005 I believe and many have not updated to the new one yet, even though the correct one  must be on every rates bill, power bill, bank statement etc. The other thing to remember is that you cannot tell 100% from a post code is rural or not. While if the 3rd number is 7, 8 or 9 in a postcode, about 98% of the time with NZ post it is rural, but there are a few exception (and vica verca). Other couriers don't use post codes as the basis for their rural designations. S mentioned about a physical address can have a different town and suberb sometimes. This is usually the difference between courier brands. NZ Post and freightways courier brands use different address systems. Often the same physical address inputted will look completely different between the companies, but it is he same actual address.

Jakob, use the address checker to sort out your rural urban problems https://www.addresscheck.co.nz/ and stop you being caught out by the end of month courier rural under ticketing charge

Thanks for all that info' Donal, 

Yes! it can be very confusing for Buyers & Casual Sellers - One doesn't learn all these tricks and traits when not exposed to the environment on a regular basis. - That's most helpful info' - Cheers. 😊

Another trick is sometimes a street number is given to you that the courier base says does not exist. , again particularly prevalent for rural addresses. When printing ticket from a courier site, the ticket will then not print as address not recognised as an official address. The work around for this is to find an address on that road that does exist, insert that for the ticket printing, but in the "extra delivery information" part of the ticket, put the actual address in capitals. When the ticket is printed simply cross out the wrong street number with a pen and you are done

Oh Gosh! - Thank you very much Donal, - I'm bookmarking all this info' - Much appreciated 😊👍