A while ago we made a small but important change to our WordPress ecommerce themes. Instead of nation-wide sales also international orders were now possible. This led to another challenge: postal address have different formats in different countries.
You may wonder: “…and, whats the big deal with this?”
Well, lets have a look at the classic example of two Joe Doe’s, one living in the US and the other one in Germany. The different addresses would be:

USA:

JOE DOE
1500 E MAIN AVE STE 201
SPRINGFIELD VA 22162–1010
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Germany:

Joe Doe
Teststr.  1a
11111 TESTSTADT
GERMANY

If I typed the data of the second Joe Doe into the address form of my E-Commerce application fitting for US-addresses, then I would get an address like this:

JOE DOE
1A TESTSTRASSE
TESTSTADT BAYERN 11111
GERMANY

I can assure you that this will confuse German shop owners + the German national postal delivery services (Deutsche Bundespost).

Ok – so where can I get the information from?
Happily, there exists an international organization which takes care of these issues – the UPU, Universal Postal Union.
They give you here the officially correct address format for every country: http://www.upu.int/en/activities/addressing/postal-addressing-systems-in-member-countries.html – (interestingly, it doesn’t like Opera as browser)