How to Change Your Account Information: Part 2

Customers want to know about the security of their financial information with respect to Zip Code Download. Zip Code Download does not save any bank account information inputted at checkout. Instead, we use Authorize.net, a secure payment gateway and trusted transaction source. Authorize.net allows Zip Code Download to store our customers credit card information to reduce the inconvenience of renewing their subscriptions.

Updating Your Credit Card Information

To update your credit card information, we have provided a simple link on your “My Subscriptions” page (see screenshot below). The link will then take you to a page that will ask you a few simple questions about your CC information.

Why are ZIP Codes Missing In My Database?

Frequently, customers are concerned that data is missing from their database - as they should be. Here at Zip Code Download, we highly value accurate and reliable data. Above all, we hope that our database is current. The key point is that because the USPS is constantly changing their data, some ZIP code are literally removed from their database.

There are many reasons for the removal of ZIP codes that we won’t go into. However, it is important to remember this fact.

Your customers may worry that you have unreliable data. However, you must remain confident that your data is in sync with the USPS - the ones in charge of ZIP codes.

If you are unsure about your data, the USPS has a very neat feature that allows you to look up a city based on a ZIP code. To do this, visit www.USPS.com and select “Look Up a ZIP Code” under their “Quick Tools” menu on the left side of the page. Then select “Go to Full-Page Version.” Once there, click on the “Cities by ZIP Code” tab. Then enter the ZIP code in question.

If the ZIP code has been removed, you will get a message saying that the ZIP code is not a valid ZIP code. (See attached screen shot). Please do this before contacting customer support.

Three and Four Digit ZIP Codes Appearing in Database

Many customers wonder why their data is including three and four digit ZIP codes. Of course, the United States Postal Service does not manufacture cities with only three and four digit ZIP codes. Most customers experience these because they are opening the data up with a program, such as Microsoft Excel, which has a default setting to eliminate zeros preceding a number. For instance, Holtsville, New York has a ZIP code of 00501. Excel will take that file, remove the zeros preceding the “5” and give you “501.”

Remedies

There are three main ways to remedy this issue:

1. Instead of downloading the .CSV version of the file from ZipCodeDownload.com, download the “Excel (97 or later)” version. This has been preformatted to accept leading zeros.
2. If you download the .CSV file, format the column by selecting the column and right clicking it selecting Format Cells> Number> Special> “Zip Code.”
3. Follow the same steps in way number two but instead do …> Number> Custom> and under Type enter “00000”.

Either of these three ways are acceptable, however, we strongly recommend that you download the file type specific to the program that you will use.