Has HowBridge Passed the MOI TGOS Review? How Does the System Check Your House Number When You Enter a Delivery Address?
Quick Answer: What Is HowBridge's Delivery Address Verification?
HowBridge Information Co., Ltd.'s application to the Ministry of the Interior's "Taiwan Geospatial One-Stop (TGOS)" platform for the "Nationwide House Number Matching Service" was approved on September 21, 2026 and went live the same day. From that day on, whenever a member adds or edits a Taiwan home-delivery address in the website Member Center, the HowBridge app, or the LINE consolidation assistant, the HowBridge server sends the "city/county + district + street name and house number" to TGOS to match it against the house-number data compiled by the Ministry of the Interior from each city and county's household registration offices, and replies within about 1 second with one of four outcomes: Matched to a registered house number (shows the registered form, including village and neighborhood, plus coordinates), Did you mean: (lists the closest house numbers, applied with one tap), "Address not found" (tick "I confirm this address is correct" and save as usual), or the service is temporarily unavailable (you're simply let through). No outcome will ever stop you from saving a recipient; the check only sends the address text -- never your name, phone number, or member data.
HowBridge only has a Shenzhen consolidation warehouse and a Taoyuan operations warehouse, and only offers China → Taiwan consolidation service; we have no warehouses in any other country and do not offer purchasing-agent (daigou) services. The house-number matching service is only used to check home-delivery addresses within Taiwan; store addresses for convenience-store pickup are filled in directly from the store's own data and do not need, and do not get, a separate check.
What Review Did HowBridge Pass? What Is TGOS's "Nationwide House Number Matching Service"?
Taiwan Geospatial One-Stop (TGOS) is a nationwide gateway for geographic data and web services, built by the Ministry of the Interior's Department of Information Management; its "Nationwide House Number Address Locating Service V4.0" includes the "Nationwide House Number Matching Service," which matches a string of Taiwan address text to the standard house number and coordinates in the house-number data. This house-number data is compiled by each city and county's household registration offices and transmitted to the central government: the Ministry of the Interior began subsidizing counties and cities to build house-number databases in 1998 and, by 2009, had completed the then-25 counties and cities, totaling about 8,000,000 records; according to the Ministry's 2025 fiscal-year statistics, the 22 counties and cities' house-number data together total more than 10,000,000 records, updated monthly or irregularly depending on the county or city. The service has two tiers: "general use" (online batch matching, 10,000 records per day) and "advanced use" (for government agencies, corporate bodies, academic institutions, and industry, connected via Web Service, 300,000 records per month) -- advanced use requires an online application and is issued an APPID and APIKey only after review and approval. HowBridge applied for advanced use as a registered company and passed the review on September 21, 2026, completing the connection and going live the same day.
| Item | Details |
|---|---|
| Applicant | HowBridge Information Co., Ltd. (Unified Business No. 57151105) |
| Service name | MOI TGOS platform's "Nationwide House Number Matching Service" under "Nationwide House Number Address Locating Service V4.0" (Web Service QueryAddr; advanced use) |
| Review result | Approved on September 21, 2026; issued an APPID and APIKey for the integration (the keys are stored only on HowBridge's Taiwan servers and never included in any front-end code) |
| Integration host | HowBridge's server in Taoyuan (fixed IP); the server queries TGOS on the user's behalf |
| Matching data | House-number data built by each city and county's household registration offices and compiled by the Ministry of the Interior (more than 10,000,000 records in total for FY2025); returns structured house-number fields (city/county, township/district, village, neighborhood, road/street, section, lane, alley, number) and WGS84 (EPSG:4326) coordinates |
| Usage quota | Advanced use allows 300,000 records per month (calculated per calendar month); HowBridge also sets per-minute and per-day query limits for each member to prevent a single account from using up the whole quota |
| Purpose | Checks in real time whether a house number exists when members enter a Taiwan home-delivery address on the website, in the app, or via LINE, reducing delivery failures caused by address errors |
No. What the Ministry of the Interior reviews is the integration application -- it issues the keys after confirming that the applicant, intended use, and server information meet the platform's usage rules; it is not an endorsement or certification of HowBridge's service quality. Every mention of "passed review" on this page refers only to the approval of this application.
Why Verify the Delivery Address Before Consolidation? What Happens If the Address Is Wrong?
Your package leaves the Shenzhen consolidation warehouse, clears customs in Taiwan, and is handed to a home-delivery courier -- the last mile depends entirely on the one line of address you filled in. And it's not only about delivery: under Article 18 of the Air Express Cargo Clearance Regulations, when an express operator files an import customs declaration on behalf of the cargo holder, it must declare the consignee's name and address, and customs may list the declared consignee as the taxpayer on the tax payment certificate -- so the delivery address is also data used for customs clearance and the tax bill. If an address is missing a "section," has a wrong house number, or the county/district doesn't match the street, the courier can't find the door on site, and the package gets returned to HowBridge's Taoyuan operations warehouse -- you have to wait for another attempt, and redelivery may involve extra processing. In the past we could only catch this by manually checking after you submitted; now house-number matching moves that step up to while you're still typing.
For Members: One Fewer Return and Redelivery
You know whether the house number exists before you even save; if you enter the wrong section number or leave out a lane, the system lists the closest house numbers so you can apply one with a tap, instead of fixing it later.
For the Warehouse and Courier: The Registered Form Reduces Mix-Ups
A successfully matched address comes with the registered form from the household-registration data (including village and neighborhood) and its coordinates, giving the shipping label and delivery information a consistent basis and reducing confusion between the same street but different sections, or the same number but different villages.
For Your Rights: The Check Never Blocks Submission
New house numbers in remote areas, recently renumbered addresses, or ones not yet in the database can all show up as "not found." That's why we designed this as a reminder, not a blocker -- if you've confirmed the address is correct, save it as usual; the responsibility is in your hands, not the system's.
In fiscal year 2025, the U.S. Postal Service had about 3.96 billion pieces of mail classified as "undeliverable as addressed" (3.64% of volume, with processing costs of about $861 million); of that, four categories of address defects -- "insufficient address," "no such number," "no such street," and "illegible" -- together accounted for 12.57% (USPS PostalPro statistics). In the Netherlands, only 75% of B2C home deliveries are addressed correctly on the first attempt (van Duin et al., 2016). Spain's estimated first-delivery failure rate is 10%-15%, with measured rates of 8.1%-20% (Lorenzo-Espejo et al., 2025). In Taiwan, a 2022 report from the Ministry of the Interior's Department of Statistics found that when government datasets were matched against the nationwide house-number master file, "missing address elements" accounted for 0.37%-3.65% of records, with the top patterns being an incorrect or unlisted street name, a blank lane name, or a missing street name and number -- these are exactly the kinds of errors that real-time verification can catch as you type. See "Academic and Research Literature" below for full sources.
What Do You See While Entering an Address? Understanding All Four Verification Outcomes
Once you've selected the city/county and district and entered the street name and house number in the address field, the verification result appears below the field about 1 second after you stop typing. Here are the four states, the on-screen prompt, what each one means, and what you can do (the prompt text is the same across all three clients):
| Status | On-Screen Prompt | What It Means | What You Can Do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Match found | Matched to a registered house number + the registered form, e.g. “No. 55, Sec. 2, Jinshan S. Rd., Yongkang Village, 10th Neighborhood, Da'an Dist., Taipei City” | This house number exists in the house-number data (an exact-match hit); the system also obtains its coordinates. | Just save it. The registered form is shown only for you to check against -- it will not overwrite what you typed in the address field. |
| Candidate addresses | Did you mean: + up to 5 of the closest house numbers, each with a "Use" button | The house number you entered doesn't exist in the data, but the closest house numbers on the same street segment were found (for example, you type No. 9999 and the platform returns No. 239 as a candidate). | After checking it, tap "Use" -- the address field switches to the candidate's street name and house number (the city/county, district, village, and neighborhood are automatically removed); querying again usually then results in a match. |
| Address not found | Address not found. Please check the city, district and house number. + a checkbox for "I confirm this address is correct" | Neither the exact match nor the fuzzy match found it: you may have picked the wrong city/county or district, mistyped the street name, or it could be a new house number not yet in the database. | First double-check the city/county, district, and street name; if they're correct, tick "I confirm this address is correct" and save. The system records this as "confirmed by member," and later checks will never override your confirmation. |
| Temporarily unavailable | No prompt is shown (in rare cases: "The address verification service is temporarily unavailable; you can still submit directly.") | The MOI platform timed out, is under maintenance, the quota is used up, or the address contains characters the system can't process. | Just save as usual; the system will retry in the background and fill in the result later. |
If the address field only has "XX Road" or "XX Village" without a number, the screen shows Please enter the street name and house number. and the system won't send a query. Home delivery needs a house number to deliver to, so please add one (either Arabic numerals or Chinese numerals such as "五十五號" work; a sub-unit suffix like "-1" or a floor number like "3F" doesn't affect matching).
How Do You Use This on the Website, in the App, and on LINE?
All three entry points use the same verification service -- only the screen differs: the website Member Center and the app show results live as you type; the LINE consolidation assistant shows the result on the confirmation card before you save, so you check it first and then save. Here are the steps for the website and app:
1Choose the City/County and District
In Member Center › Recipients, tap "Add recipient" (or edit an existing home-delivery recipient), then choose the city/county first and the district next. The 3-digit zip code fills in automatically.
2Enter the Street Name and House Number
In the "Address" field, enter the street name, section, lane, alley, and number (for example, "金山南路二段55號" -- No. 55, Sec. 2, Jinshan S. Rd.). You can add a floor number or a sub-unit suffix like "-1"; full-width numerals and both "台" and "臺" (two ways to write "Tai" in Taiwan) are recognized. About 1 second after you stop typing, the verification result appears below the address field.
3Act on the Result
If you see Matched to a registered house number, you can save; if you see Did you mean:, check the candidates and tap "Use"; if you see "Address not found," first check the city/county, district, and street name, and once you're sure they're correct, tick "I confirm this address is correct."
4Save
Tap "Save." The system records the verification result (status, registered form, and coordinates) to this recipient's data in the background, and it's reused automatically the next time you create a consolidation order; the address is rechecked automatically whenever you change it.
When you add a home-delivery recipient on LINE via "Recipients / Declarants," the system checks the house number once you have filled in the name, phone number, and address, and shows the result on the confirmation card before saving: a match shows "Matched to a registered house number"; if there are close house numbers, candidates are listed and you can tap "Use" or choose "Save the current address anyway"; if the house number is not found, the entry is saved only after you tap "I confirm the address is correct – save." Because you see the result before saving, no separate push is sent afterward; only when verification is temporarily unavailable does the system match in the background after saving and push a reminder for candidates or not-found results. To edit an address, use the Member Center or the app.
The live verification screen ships with the next update to both the iPhone/iPad and Android apps. App versions before that update can still add recipients normally -- after saving, the address is still matched in the background and the result is still recorded.
How Does the System Match Addresses? What's the Difference Between Exact Match and Fuzzy Match?
After HowBridge's server receives your city/county, district, and address field, it first normalizes the text (converts full-width numerals to half-width, removes any duplicated city/county/district and the 3-digit zip code, and standardizes "台" to "臺"), then queries TGOS in two stages. The platform breaks the address down into the city/county, township/district, village, neighborhood, road/street, lane/alley, and house number and processes each separately; the official documentation itself uses the terms "exact match" and "fuzzy match" for its matching mechanism, and fuzzy matching has additional parameters such as "odd/even numbering," "nearest house number," and "error tolerance" -- how these parameters are set directly affects the result:
| Stage | How It Queries | Example Input | TGOS's Response | How We Display It |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stage 1: Exact match | Locks onto the city/county, township/district, and street segment, accepting only house numbers that actually exist in the household-registration data | 臺北市大安區金山南路二段55號 (No. 55, Sec. 2, Jinshan S. Rd., Da'an Dist., Taipei City) | 1 “exact match” result: No. 55, Sec. 2, Jinshan S. Rd., Yongkang Village, 10th Neighborhood, Da'an Dist., Taipei City, longitude 121.527182, latitude 25.032315 | Matched to a registered house number + the registered form |
| Stage 2: Fuzzy match (only runs if Stage 1 finds nothing) | Finds the closest house number on the same street segment using the platform's odd/even numbering and nearest-house-number mechanisms, returning up to 5 results | 臺北市大安區金山南路二段9999號 (No. 9999, Sec. 2, Jinshan S. Rd., Da'an Dist., Taipei City) | 1 “fuzzy match” result: No. 239, Sec. 2, Jinshan S. Rd., Jin'an Village, 18th Neighborhood, Da'an Dist., Taipei City | Did you mean: + candidate + "Use" |
| Both stages find nothing | — | 臺北市大安區查無此路999號 (No. 999, a street that doesn't exist, Da'an Dist., Taipei City) | 0 "exact match" results, 0 "fuzzy match" results | "Address not found" + "I confirm this address is correct" |
House-number data is recorded in separate fields for city/county, township/district, village, neighborhood, road/street, section, lane, alley, and number, so the full address returned on a successful match includes the village and neighborhood. This is simply the registered form in the data, provided for you to check against; home delivery doesn't need the village or neighborhood, so your address field can stay exactly as you typed it.
A fuzzy match returns the house number on the same street segment closest to the number you typed (per the official documentation: "if there is no exact match, the address with the highest similarity is returned"). If you typed No. 9999 and the candidate is No. 239, it's most likely a mistyped number or the wrong section -- go with your actual house number, and don't apply a candidate address that isn't really yours just to pass the check.
Where Is My Address Sent, and How Long Is It Kept?
House-number matching only needs the address text. All that HowBridge's server sends to the MOI TGOS platform is the string "city/county + township/district + street name and house number"; it never sends your name, phone number, email, member ID, or package data. The registered form and coordinates that TGOS returns are recorded in your recipient data and used for verification and shipping.
| Data | Sent To | Storage Location and Retention |
|---|---|---|
| Address text (city/county, district, street name and house number) | MOI TGOS platform (Taiwan) | HowBridge's server caches the matching result for up to 30 days, keyed by the normalized address; the cache doesn't contain any member identity -- if someone else queries the same address, it hits the same cached result, but there's no way to tell who looked it up |
| Matching result (status, registered form, coordinates) | Not shared externally | Recorded in your recipient data; deleted when the recipient is deleted |
| Your ticked "I confirm this address is correct" | Not shared externally | Recorded as this recipient's confirmation status; never overridden by later checks |
| Name, phone number, email | Never sent to TGOS | Handled the same way as the rest of your recipient data always has been |
Who this verification's data is sent to, why, and how long it's kept are already set out in HowBridge's Privacy Policy, Section 3 (Purposes of Data Use), Section 4.1 (Service Providers: Address Verification and Map Services), and Section 8.1 (Cross-Border Transfers). A delivery address is personal data (contact information) as defined in the Personal Data Protection Act; under Article 8 of that Act, a data collector must clearly inform the data subject of the purpose of collection and the period, region, recipients, and method of using the personal data when collecting it from them -- this page and the Privacy Policy together form part of that notice.
What Situations Cause an Address Not to Be Found? Does That Mean You Can't Ship It?
Not being found doesn't mean you can't ship to it. The purpose of house-number matching is to remind you, not to approve or reject your address. Here are the common situations we've found through testing:
| Situation | What Happens | Recommended Action |
|---|---|---|
| A newly assigned house number, a recently renamed street, or some remote areas or new developments | Each county's house-number data is updated monthly or irregularly, depending on the county; before it's added, the result shows "address not found" | After double-checking it's correct, tick "I confirm this address is correct" and save as usual |
| The wrong city/county or district was selected (for example, choosing Taoyuan Dist. instead of Zhongli Dist.) | The exact match is locked to the selected city/county and district, so it comes back not found right away | Fix the city/county and district first -- the system will automatically recheck |
| The section number, lane, or alley is missing or wrong | This usually returns candidate addresses | Compare the candidates to confirm the correct section and lane/alley, then apply one |
| The address contains characters such as quotation marks ("), consecutive dashes (--), or < / > | The MOI platform rejects this kind of input, and the screen treats it as temporarily unavailable | Remove the extra characters; parentheses, commas, sub-unit suffixes, and floor numbers don't affect matching |
| The MOI platform is under maintenance, times out, or this month's quota is used up | Temporarily unavailable -- you're simply let through | Save as usual; the system will retry in the background |
| Convenience-store pickup recipients | Not checked (the store address is filled in from the store's own data) | Just select a store |
The shipping label prints the delivery address you saved (city/county, district, and address field). When a match succeeds, the registered form is used only for checking and coordinates -- it doesn't rewrite your address; if you confirmed an address that came back "not found," the courier still delivers based on what you entered. If delivery fails, the package is returned to HowBridge's Taoyuan operations warehouse, and how redelivery is handled follows what customer service tells you (see the Taiwan Consolidation Beginner's Guide for the consolidation process).
Terms Used on This Page
- Taiwan Geospatial One-Stop (TGOS)
- A nationwide gateway for geographic data and web services (Taiwan Geospatial One Stop), built by the Ministry of the Interior's Department of Information Management. It offers services such as nationwide house-number address locating, coordinate-to-house-number lookup, batch house-number matching, and a map API; industry users must apply for advanced use and obtain an APPID and APIKEY through review before they can connect.
- Nationwide House Number Matching Service
- A TGOS Web Service that takes Taiwan address text as input and returns the matching standard house number (city/county / township/district / village / neighborhood / road/street / section / lane / alley / number) and coordinates from the house-number data.
- Exact Match
- Officially defined as "the matching result must be identical to the address entered"; HowBridge additionally locks the query to the city/county, township/district, and street segment. A hit means this house number exists in the house-number data.
- Fuzzy Match
- Officially defined as "fuzzy matching is performed when the entered address cannot be found (i.e., the exact match fails)," using odd/even numbering and nearest-house-number mechanisms to find candidate house numbers; a candidate only means it's the closest match, not that it's correct.
- House-Number Data
- House-number and coordinate data (with one point created per household) built by household registration offices and transmitted to the central government for compilation, after each county or city assigns house numbers under its own Road Naming and House Numbering Self-Government Ordinance; for FY2025, the 22 counties and cities together had more than 10,000,000 records, and this is the data source behind TGOS's house-number matching.
- Registered Form (Standard House Number)
- The complete registered form of a house number in the household-registration data, including the village and neighborhood, for example “No. 55, Sec. 2, Jinshan S. Rd., Yongkang Village, 10th Neighborhood, Da'an Dist., Taipei City”.
- WGS84 Coordinates (EPSG:4326)
- A globally used geographic coordinate system; TGOS returns longitude (X) and latitude (Y) in this coordinate system, per HowBridge's configuration.
- Geocoding
- The process of converting address text into geographic coordinates; house-number matching is a form of geocoding, but it additionally uses official house-number data as the benchmark for whether a house number actually exists.
- "I Confirm This Address Is Correct"
- When the result is "address not found," ticking this box records the address as "confirmed by member," and later checks will never override this confirmation.
Sources and Verification Limits
The functional description on this page is based on HowBridge's in-app behavior and the actual call logs to the MOI TGOS platform on 2026-09-21; the platform specifications, data sources, and regulations are based on the primary sources listed below, each with a link to the original page and the date it was checked.
Government and Official Sources
- MOI TGOS, "Nationwide House Number Address Locating Service -- Background / Development Timeline / Application Guide" (accessed 2026-09-21): "Starting in 1998, the Ministry of the Interior progressively subsidized counties and cities to build their house-number databases and query systems in phases; by 2009, all 25 of Taiwan's counties and cities at the time had completed their house-number data in full, totaling about 8,000,000 records" "Each county and city's house-number database was built using one point per household"; application eligibility: "Advanced use (government agencies, corporate bodies, academic institutions, industry) / Applicable to: Nationwide House Number Address Locating Service, coordinate-to-house-number service... / Query limit: 300,000 matching queries provided per month (calculated per calendar month) / How to apply: apply online; once approved, you may obtain an APPID and APIKEY" "General use (all members) / Applicable to: online batch matching service / Query limit: 10,000 provided per day"; the development timeline notes that V4.0 (2017-2019) introduced rare-character recognition and old house-number search.
- MOI, Taiwan Geospatial One-Stop (TGOS) home page (accessed 2026-09-21): footer reads "Copyright, Ministry of the Interior Department of Information Management" "Customer service: (02) 2513-2245"; "Platform Introduction": "Taiwan Geospatial One-Stop (the TGOS platform) is a portal for nationwide geographic data and web services" "TGOS provides an online address-to-coordinate service... for system developers, it also offers an integration service for converting addresses to coordinates or coordinates to addresses" "We cannot guarantee that every web map service will always be available"; "TGOS Value-Added Application and Partnership Performance Award Operating Guidelines" (amended June 24, 2022): gives the full English name as Taiwan Geospatial One Stop.
- MOI, "House Number Address Locating Service Sample Site (TGOS_WEB_API)" (accessed 2026-09-21): navigation tree reads "Nationwide House Number Address Locating Service V4.0 › Nationwide House Number Matching Service › QueryAddr"; "This service requires you to first register as a TGOS member on the TGOS website, then apply for the service; only after the application is approved and you obtain an APPId identifier and an APIKey authentication code can you use it"; the V4.0 response fields include period, full address, city/county, township/district, village, neighborhood, main road/street, section, lane, alley, sub-alley, sub-lane, house number, X coordinate, Y coordinate, minimum statistical area, tier-1 statistical area, and tier-2 statistical area.
- MOI, "House Number Matching Service QueryAddr Web Service Parameter Guide" (accessed 2026-09-21): "House Number Matching Service: performs house-number matching after authentication and authorization succeed"; "oSRS / the coordinate system returned -- accepted coordinate system codes are: EPSG:4326, EPSG:3825, EPSG:3826, EPSG:3827, EPSG:3828"; "oFuzzyType / there are currently three fuzzy-matching mechanisms: nearest-house-number mechanism... odd/even numbering mechanism... odd/even numbering + nearest-house-number mechanism"; "oIsOnlyFullMatch / whether to perform only an exact match... if set to true, the fuzzy-matching mechanism will not be used"; "oReturnMaxCount / when there are multiple results, this limits the maximum number returned (1-9)"; a sample response shows the OutMatchType field returning "Exact match." "Batch House Number Address Matching Service": "Allow fuzzy matching: fuzzy matching is performed when the entered address cannot be found (exact match failed)" "Perform exact match: the matching result must be identical to the address entered" "Note: how the parameters are set directly affects the matching result."
- MOI, "TGOS MAP API -- Address Locating" (accessed 2026-09-21): "This function supports fuzzy locating, processing the city/county, township/district, village, neighborhood, road/street, and lane/alley separately from the house number" "If there is no exact match, the address with the highest similarity to the entered address string is returned."
- MOI Department of Information Management (Data.gov.tw), "Total House-Number Records by County/City, FY2025" (published 2026-06-09; CSV accessed 2026-09-21): fields are "County/City, Year, Record Count, System Integration Status, Data Update Frequency"; example record counts for the 22 counties and cities: New Taipei City 1,974,164; Taichung City 1,307,595; Kaohsiung City 1,275,340; Taipei City 1,151,764; Taoyuan City 1,087,509; Tainan City 845,901; update frequency: Taipei City, New Taipei City, Taichung City, and Yilan County are "monthly," the remaining 18 counties and cities are "irregular"; the 22 counties and cities total more than 10,000,000 records (summing the CSV ourselves gives 10,698,546 records).
- MOI Department of Household Registration (Data.gov.tw), "Nationwide Street Name Data" (accessed 2026-09-21): "Street name data is transmitted to the central government through the house-number databases built by each household registration office, providing nationwide street names" -- the source of house-number data is each household registration office. MOI Department of Household Registration, "House Numbering (Application Guide)": the applicants and required documents for assigning, reissuing, or replacing a house number; the legal basis for house numbering is each special municipality's and county's/city's own Road Naming and House Numbering Self-Government Ordinance (for example, the Taipei City Road Naming and House Numbering Self-Government Ordinance, administered by the Taipei City Government's Department of Civil Affairs) -- there is no central-government regulation whose name includes "house number."
- Air Express Cargo Clearance Regulations, Article 18 (National Laws & Regulations Database, amended February 23, 2026): "When an express operator files a customs declaration in the name of the import cargo holder, it must declare the consignee's name and address (except for documents), and must also declare the consignee's Unified Business Number for dutiable low-value and high-value express cargo" "When an express operator files a customs declaration under the preceding two paragraphs, customs may list the declared consignee as the taxpayer on the tax payment certificate and issue the tax bill" -- the delivery address is data declared for both express import customs clearance and the tax bill.
- Personal Data Protection Act, Articles 2, 8, 19, and 20 (National Laws & Regulations Database, amended November 11, 2025): Article 2, Item 1 defines personal data as including "contact information... and other data that can directly or indirectly identify the individual"; Article 8, Paragraph 1 requires that, when collecting personal data from the data subject, the collector clearly inform them of matters including "the purpose of collection" and "the period, region, recipients, and method of using the personal data"; Article 19, Paragraph 1 requires that a non-government agency collecting or processing personal data have a specific purpose and meet one of the conditions such as "having a contractual or quasi-contractual relationship with the data subject" or "having obtained the data subject's consent"; Article 20, Paragraph 1 requires that a non-government agency's use of personal data "be within the necessary scope of the specific purpose of collection."
- Mail Handling Rules, Articles 56 and 58 (National Laws & Regulations Database, amended May 27, 2022): "Mail that cannot be delivered to the addressee, or that the addressee refuses to accept, is undeliverable mail" "Undeliverable domestic letter mail is returned to the sender" "Mail that cannot be delivered, or that is not delivered under the regulations and cannot be returned to the sender, must be held and posted for claiming at the originating post office for one month; if unclaimed by the deadline, it becomes unclaimed mail" -- this is how Taiwan Post handles "undeliverable addresses" for postal mail (home-delivery couriers follow their own separate contracts).
- Academia Sinica Center for GIS, RCHSS, "TGOS Nationwide House Number Address Locating Service Increases Daily Matching Capacity" (2016-02-23) (secondary source, academic commentary): describes the service as "the government's most authoritative house-number locating (geocoding) service system," and records that, starting July 1, 2015, the daily matching capacity was raised from 500 to 10,000 -- "most authoritative" is Academia Sinica's own assessment, not a claim made by the Ministry of the Interior itself.
Academic and Research Literature
Establishment, Maintenance and Application of Address Coding (Di zhi bian ma zhi jian zhi, wei yun yu ying yong; original report in Chinese)
When Taiwan's own government address datasets were matched against the nationwide house-number master file, match rates ranged from 88.91% (Taipower) to 99.59% (household registration); the unmatched "missing address elements" accounted for 0.37%-3.65%, with the top three patterns being "incorrect or unlisted street/place name," "blank lane name," and "missing street/place name and number" (pp. 23-26). This is exactly the type of error that this page's real-time verification is designed to catch as you type.
UAA Roll-Up FY1998–FY2025 (Undeliverable-as-Addressed Mail Statistics)
In fiscal year 2025, the U.S. Postal Service still had about 3.96 billion pieces of mail classified as "undeliverable as addressed," about 3.64% of total volume, with processing costs of about $861 million ($0.217 per piece; $0.411 per piece to return to sender). The cost of address problems can be measured in real numbers.
UAA Mail FY25 Q4 – ACS UAA/Class Volume by Industry
Among the reasons for non-delivery in fiscal year 2025 Q4, "insufficient address" accounted for 8.42%, "no such number" 2.96%, "no such street" 1.11%, and "illegible" 0.08% -- these four categories of address defects together add up to 12.57%. A non-existent house number and an incorrect street name are exactly the two that house-number matching can flag directly.
Addressing the world – An address for everyone: The white paper
The Universal Postal Union notes that route planning using geocoded address data let Post Denmark save about €7.5 million a year (p. 36): "better addresses mean better routes and lower transport costs." The coordinates that house-number matching returns are the first step in turning an address into data that can be used for route planning.
Improving home delivery efficiency by using principles of address intelligence for B2C deliveries
Empirical data from Dutch B2C home delivery: only 75% of deliveries reach the correct address on the first attempt, with 15% left with a neighbor and 10% returned to a depot for a second delivery attempt (p. 17); applying address-level "address intelligence" prediction and intervention can reduce rework by about 11% (p. 23).
Last mile logistics: Impact of unstructured addresses on delivery times
Based on an estimate from 5,816 deliveries in Pakistan's express industry, a courier spends an average of an extra 117-219 seconds per package looking for an unclear address (p. 7). Writing a clear, correct address saves on-site time on every single delivery.
Exploring the correlation between courier workload, service density and distance with the success of last-mile and first-mile reverse logistics
Spain's first-delivery failure rate is estimated at 10%-15% (citing Deloitte 2020), while the authors' own measurements ranged from 8.1%-20%, with "incorrect address" listed as one of the causes of failure. Even in a mature market, more than one in ten deliveries fails on the first attempt.
Using an optimized Chinese address matching method to develop a geocoding service: A case study of Shenzhen, China
Testing Chinese address matching on about 1.36 million business addresses and 100,000 disease records in Shenzhen: the average match rate for a similarity above 60% exceeded 90%, with inconsistent house-number formatting as the leading cause of match failures. The difficulties of matching in a Chinese-language address system carry over to Taiwan -- which is also why we lock onto the city/county and district before matching.
Recognition method of new address elements in Chinese address matching based on deep learning
The authors note that "as cities develop rapidly, new addresses keep appearing; word-segmentation dictionaries and address databases can't be updated fast enough, posing a serious challenge to address-matching accuracy." This is the academic basis for this page's design principle that "a new house number may come back not found, so a not-found result never blocks submission."
User-friendly locations of error messages in web forms: Put them on the right side of the erroneous input field
An online experiment with 303 participants found that placing error messages next to the field where the error occurred significantly outperformed placing them at the top or bottom of the form, in efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction alike. The verification result card described on this page sits directly below the address field for exactly this reason.
Usable error message presentation in the World Wide Web: Do not show errors right away
Two experiments (with 77 and 90 participants) found that error messages popping up on every keystroke performed worst, with users often simply ignoring them. That's why HowBridge doesn't check on every keystroke, but instead checks once about 1 second after you stop typing and shows a single result card.
① The details of the MOI platform's matching mechanisms (odd/even numbering, nearest house number, etc.) are based on the explanatory text in the platform's own responses -- we cannot access its internal algorithm; ② the update frequency and coverage of the house-number data are decided by each county/city and the Ministry of the Interior (FY2025 statistics: 4 counties/cities monthly, 18 counties/cities irregular), and this page does not promise that any specific address will always be found; ③ the academic figures cited on this page come from each study's own sample and country, and do not represent Taiwan's or HowBridge's actual return rate -- neither Chunghwa Post nor the Consumers' Foundation publishes statistics on "returns due to address errors"; ④ the 300,000-record monthly quota is the MOI TGOS platform's rule for advanced use -- HowBridge additionally sets a per-member query limit, and when the quota is used up, verification pauses but saving a recipient is unaffected; ⑤ TGOS's own platform introduction carries the disclaimer that it "cannot guarantee every web service will always be available," and this page's fallback design (letting you through whenever verification is temporarily unavailable) exists precisely for that reason.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Did HowBridge Actually Get by Passing the MOI Review?
Will Verification Slow Down or Block Me From Filling In My Address?
It Shows "Matched to a Registered House Number" but the Registered Form Is Different From What I Typed -- Should I Change It?
The Candidates Under "Did You Mean" Aren't My Address -- What Should I Do?
If a New Development or a Recently Assigned House Number Isn't Found, Can I Still Ship There?
Does This Also Check Convenience-Store Pickup?
Who Is My Address Sent To?
Does Adding a Recipient on LINE Get Checked Too?
Will Existing Recipient Data Be Checked Retroactively?
Will HowBridge Sell My Address to Third Parties or Use It for Anything Beyond Consolidation?
Related Reading
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Convenience Store Pickup for Consolidated Parcels (7-11 / FamilyMart)
How Long Does Customs Clearance Take in Taiwan? A Complete Timeline Guide
LINE Official Account Features Explained
HowBridge iPhone / iPad App: Features and Download
The Complete Guide to Avoiding Cross-Border Shopping Scams
Will a Wrong Delivery Address Get My Parcel Returned? How to Fix and Prevent It
Privacy Policy
Check Your Delivery Address Now
Go to the Member Center to add or edit a home-delivery recipient, enter the street name and house number, and take a look at the verification result -- save with confidence when it's a match, or just confirm and save when it's not found.
Go to Member Center › Recipients