A missing flat number. A mistyped postcode. A customer who moved house two years ago and never updated their details. Small address errors turn into failed deliveries, reshipping costs and customers who don’t come back.
OptiMail is BBS’s address checking app for UK Shopify merchants. Here’s how it works.
OptiMail checks your customers’ UK delivery addresses after checkout. If an address looks wrong or incomplete, your customer is asked to review or update it on the Thank You page, before you dispatch the order. Flagged orders show inside Shopify, so your team can act early.
OptiMail checks addresses against Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF), the official database of all 29 million UK addresses. BBS is fully licensed by Royal Mail, so you’re checking against the same data that underpins the UK postal system, not a third-party approximation.
It means the person may no longer live at that address. An address can be perfectly formatted and still be the wrong place to send a parcel. OptiMail highlights possible movers and goneaways, so you can check before the order goes out.
OptiMail is free to install and there’s no monthly fee. Valid addresses cost nothing. You only pay 45p (per flagged address / when an address is corrected).
OptiMail checks UK delivery addresses only.
BBS has been working with UK address data since 1980, and the story goes back even further.
In 1976, our co-founder Bob Carter was already using Royal Mail’s newly introduced postcodes to identify and target voters, one of the earliest recorded uses of postcode targeting in the UK. At the time, the only way to find the postcode for an address was to look it up by hand in Royal Mail’s “Blue Books”.
In the 1980s, Bob and his partner Paul Chapman set up GB Mailing Systems and pioneered postcode lookup technology. Every time a customer types their postcode at a checkout and their address appears, they’re using an idea Bob helped create.
That 50 years of address know-how is built into OptiMail. Bob is still part of BBS today, still writing software and still asking how we can do things better.
Yes. OptiMail only uses customer data to check delivery addresses. BBS is led by Managing Director Matt Hancock, who as Minister for Digital oversaw the legislation that brought GDPR into UK law.
You can read exactly how OptiMail handles data in our OptiMail privacy policy.
Yes. The Shopify app is one part of the OptiMail range. For businesses that want to go further, BBS also offers database cleansing, deduplication, mover updates and suppression screening against MPS, goneaway and deceased files. Speak to our team to find out more.
You’ll be talking to people, not a ticket queue.
Email: sales@bbsltd.co.uk
Phone: 01978 784600