I'm trying to implement home delivery in an e-commerce app I'm building. I was wondering if anyone had any experience on how to validate that an address exists within a certain zone. I'm currently using Google maps to create polygon overlays for each delivery zone. I can use Google's API to check if an address falls within these zones, and that works fine, I was just wondering if there was an easy way to do this on the server side.
Most popular shipping services offer an address validation API
Example: http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/bussol/browse/online_tools_us_address_validation.html
But here are a few PHP libraries that also utilize Google data to use or analyze.
https://github.com/commerceguys/zone https://github.com/commerceguys/addressing
@BrianDillingham Thank you for your reply! I think I'm maybe approaching this idea of "zone" differently then what most people think of address zones. By zone I mean an actual polygon that is drawn using Google maps drawing API. I need a way to check if an address resides within the coordinates of this polygon. Now that being said, is this even the proper way to handle setting up home delivery zones? How is this normally done? Is it better to use postal codes? My client wanted be be very precise with where they allowed for delivery, but so far it's proven to be somewhat cumbersome drawing each zone by hand on a map. Any thoughts? Thanks!
I used to work for ServicePower - a major international provider of service scheduling software ( think $million ++ per install) and we used postal codes / zip codes.
I think one of the problems with drawing on maps is that they do not follow the postal codes, they cut across them. So, you have the absurdity of a delivery being permitted on one side of the street but not the other. Secondly the delivery driver needs a postal code to navigate to the location. A drawn polygon will not allow that.
You can use segments of the postal codes to describe larger areas and then present those on a map on your screen.
If you have coordinates for the polygon, use a raycasting algorithm to check if a point falls within these coordinates.
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