Validate a shipping address before purchasing a label to reduce delivery failures

Steps

1. Before creating a shipment, POST to /addresses with the raw address fields (name, street1, city, state, zip, country) and verify: true in the request body to trigger real-time validation
2. Inspect the verifications.delivery object in the response: check success (boolean) and errors array; a success: false indicates the address is undeliverable as entered
3. Surface corrected address components from the response (e.g., corrected zip code or standardized street abbreviation) and use these corrected values in your shipment creation call
4. Log and flag addresses where verifications.delivery.success is false for manual review or customer re-entry before committing to a label purchase
5. For bulk pre-validation, create address objects without verify: true and then call POST /addresses/{address_id}/verify separately to spread API cost across time
6. Distinguish between residential and commercial addresses using the residential field in the response, as carriers charge different rates for each