Saudi Address API: 50x Cost Reduction Through Lateral Thinking
The Problem
Every order in Saudi Arabia required collecting and validating a delivery address. Our manual collection process was expensive ($0.50/order), slow, error-prone, and a significant driver of failed deliveries — customers often provided incorrect or incomplete addresses.
At scale, $0.50 per order compounds fast. With thousands of daily orders, this was a six-figure annual line item. And the quality problem meant a portion of those addresses were still wrong after the cost was paid.
Address quality directly impacts delivery rate, which directly impacts unit economics. Solving this was both a direct cost saving and a compounding improvement to delivery rate.
My Role
Identified the opportunity by auditing the address collection workflow and cost structure. Scoped the API integration, built the business case, wrote the PRD, and managed delivery.
Key Decisions
Evaluated three commercial address validation vendors (all $0.10–0.30/query) before finding the Saudi National Address API — free, comprehensive, and maintained by the government. The insight: government data infrastructure in Saudi Arabia is excellent. We were paying for a service the government was giving away.
Rather than just validating addresses entered by users, I designed it as an auto-complete experience — users type the first few characters and the API suggests verified addresses. This improved both accuracy and user experience simultaneously.
Experimentation
Piloted with 10% of Saudi orders for 2 weeks. Measured: successful address capture rate, delivery success rate vs. control group, cost per order. All three improved.
Launch
Full rollout to all Saudi orders within 3 weeks of pilot success. Zero engineering issues at launch due to thorough API testing.
What I Learned
“The best solution isn't always a product decision — sometimes it's a research decision. Spending two hours surveying the landscape of available APIs before building saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars. I now systematically audit public and government APIs before scoping any data service build.”