What is a geocoding API? How product teams use it to power location features

If your product collects addresses or works with maps, you likely need a geocoding API.

Geocoding is the engine behind search, routing, delivery, and many other location-aware features. It converts user-friendly addresses into latitude and longitude coordinates your app can use for distances, maps, geofencing, and more.

In this post, we'll explain what geocoding is, why it matters, how it's used across industries, and how Radar's geocoding API helps product and engineering teams build smarter location features at scale.

What is a geocoding API?

A geocoding API converts human-readable addresses into geographic coordinates, like latitude and longitude. This process is called forward geocoding.

For example:
"1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA" → (37.4221, -122.0841)

Reverse geocoding works in the opposite direction, turning coordinates into addresses or place names.

Geocoding runs behind the scenes in nearly every product that deals with places, maps, or physical operations.

Why geocoding matters for product and engineering teams

Geocoding is more than a utility. It's the foundation for building fast, reliable, and context-aware location features.

With geocoding, your team can:

• Search and discovery. Help users find products, stores, or services with fast and accurate address resolution.
• Routing and navigation. Turn delivery locations into coordinates for ETA calculation and optimized route building.
• Geofencing and location triggers. Place geofences precisely to trigger events when users arrive, linger, or depart.
• Analytics and reporting. Power heatmaps, segmentation, or location clustering with clean data for smarter insights.
  

Geocoding is often where any location-based product journey starts.

Use cases across industries

From retail to logistics, leading brands rely on geocoding to power critical workflows, from helping users find nearby locations to optimizing routing and fulfillment.

Retail

T-Mobile uses Radar to power location-targeted offers in the T-Mobile Tuesdays app. They created over 25,000 geofences and delivered more than 520 million offers. Radar helped T-Mobile tailor deals by region, increasing relevancy and customer happiness.

"Our goal was to find the sweet spot between tech feasibility, customer experience, and privacy."

Aldo Tedjomoeljono, Product Manager

E-commerce and delivery

Route relies on Radar's geocoding and distance APIs to power accurate ETAs, carbon-neutral shipping calculations, and package tracking. They report over $1 million in annual savings, 20% higher conversion rates, and 99.99% API uptime.

"Radar's geolocation services are phenomenal. The platform is consistently available and accurate, at a fraction of the cost."

Nick Lloyd, Senior Director of Software Engineering

Logistics and supply chain

Milk Moovement improved trip completion rates to 99%, cut costs by 30%, and saved around $200K in dev and R&D annually, thanks to Radar's Trips and geofence tracking tools.

"Radar is the most accurate solution we've ever had. It freed up internal resources and helped us focus on building better dairy logistics software."

Chris O'Malley, CTO

Food service and QSR

Whataburger uses Radar to track mobile pickup arrival times. The result? A 27% increase in repeat orders, 25% more location-tracked orders, and over 80% of users opting into location tracking.

"Radar's Trips feature helps us increase kitchen efficiency, reduce food waste, and deliver quality food with minimal wait times."

Kristen Addington, Senior Digital Solutions Manager

Marketplaces and deals

Fi, a connected dog collar brand, uses Radar to power real-time tracking and geofence alerts for pet owners. With Radar, Fi delivers accurate, battery-efficient location updates and seamless user experiences at scale.

"We replaced two vendors with one, made the product more accurate, and are saving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's the kind of efficiency we're always looking for."

Jonathan Bensamoun, CEO at Fi

Why your product needs a location platform

You could assemble separate tools for geocoding, geofencing, routing, and analytics, or build your own. But that quickly becomes complex, costly, and hard to maintain.

Radar offers a complete, modern location platform:

• Geocoding API with global address support and clean metadata.
• Geofencing, routing, maps, and address validation all in one stack.
• Developer-friendly integration, open-source SDKs, and clear docs.
• Cost efficiency, often 30 to 50% less than legacy providers.

Build better location features with Radar

Radar powers smarter, faster products that connect the digital and physical world, whether that means routing, search, ETA, or engagement using geocoding as the core.

Explore the Radar Docs to get started, or contact us to learn how Radar can transform your location infrastructure.