Case Study: Borderfree Retail achieves faster, more accurate checkouts and higher conversion rates with Pitney Bowes GeoSearch API

Borderfree Retail auto-populates address data to improve online shopping experience and conversion rates

Borderfree Retail, which serves some 300 storefronts and 2 million active customers worldwide, sought to simplify checkout by auto-populating address fields to reduce data‑entry errors, undeliverable shipments and lost sales. After evaluating options, Borderfree adopted Pitney Bowes’ GeoSearch API (part of Pitney Bowes Location Intelligence) to provide address auto-complete and geolocation-driven suggestions in its payment and shipping forms.

Pitney Bowes integrated the GeoSearch API (with LocationSmart IP lookup) in about two weeks plus two weeks of testing, enabling address suggestions after just 4–5 keystrokes and average response times of ~20 ms when IP is available. The implementation standardized addresses, sped checkout, reduced errors and is expected to improve conversion rates — helping avoid undeliverable-shipment costs that previously totaled about $200,000 in shipping and $1.5 million in refunds in 2016.

Borderfree Retail

Theo Goodman

Senior Product Manager