Verifying an address matches its stated postal code before checkout
A mismatched postal code and city on an order form looks like a small typo until it turns into a delivery sent to the wrong part of the country entirely.
Adding a "closest pickup point" map to an e-commerce site
Offering pickup locker delivery as a cheaper shipping alternative only works if shoppers can quickly find a locker that is actually convenient for them, and an online retailer's first version of this feature, a plain list of locker addresses sorted by city, mostly failed at that, since a shopper had no easy way to tell which of thirty lockers listed under their city was actually near them without opening a separate map for each one.
The retailer rebuilt the feature around distance, the same underlying approach as a store finder but embedded directly inside the checkout flow rather than as a separate page. Every pickup locker location, sourced from the retailer's logistics partner, was geocoded once through /v1/forward, a batch job that counted each locker address as one billed item, giving the full network of lockers a fixed set of coordinates to work from.
At checkout, a shopper who allowed location detection got a starting point from /v1/ip, resolved from their IP address into approximate coordinates, letting the checkout page immediately show the nearest few lockers without asking the shopper to type anything. A shopper who preferred to search by their own address instead had that address geocoded through the same endpoint used for the locker network, then ranked against it the same way.
The result embedded directly into the shipping method selection step: instead of a generic "pickup locker" option that led to a separate search page, the checkout flow showed the single closest locker by name and distance right in the shipping options, with an easy way to see the next few closest if the top choice was not convenient for some reason, a schedule conflict or a locker that looked too small for a large order.
This kept the pickup option genuinely competitive with home delivery in the moment a shopper was deciding between them, rather than losing shoppers to a plain home delivery default simply because finding a locker required extra effort that a shopper was not willing to spend in the middle of checking out. The retailer's data showed pickup locker adoption increased meaningfully once the nearest option was surfaced directly in the checkout flow rather than requiring a separate search step, a change the retailer attributed specifically to removing that friction rather than to any change in what the locker service itself offered.
The retailer treated the detected starting location the same way any responsible use of IP geolocation should: as a convenient default, not a certainty, with a visible option to search by a different address for a shopper whose actual pickup preference did not match their current browsing location, someone ordering a gift to be picked up near a family member's address in another town, for example.
Volume ran with checkout sessions specifically, a smaller number than total site traffic, which kept the feature comfortably inside the free daily allowance for most of the year, with the usual prepaid option covering peak shopping periods without requiring any special planning ahead of time.
Documentation for the relevant endpoints is at /docs/forward-geocoding/ and /docs/ipv4-lookup/.