Charges for incorrect addresses

[exxos]

It's getting ridiculous the amount of people who cannot fill out their own address correctly. It's like people simply do not know how to fill out their own address or simply don't know where they live ?! In which case how do people expect me or the courier to know ?!

I've had in big red letters for over a year that USA people are not entering their city / state and the majority of USA people are STILL not doing it. A lot of orders are only putting the first line of their address and the post code. This is rather risky in particular overseas orders. When a order gets lost who's going to get the blame and have to sort it all out ? Me of course

Overall around 90% of orders now we are having to look up people addresses and manually correct them. This is not simple when there are such a variation on address formats / languages / etc. Half the time the guy at the post office says it cannot ship because the address is invalid or incomplete. So it's a wasted trip. Overall it's becoming a full time job.

So a new system will be created over the next few weeks to confirm your address before payment and you confirm it is correct, otherwise you will be billed £10 for the work involved in fixing it for you.

Unfair you say when we could just email and ask ? Well, half the people don't check their emails to start with, so how many days/weeks/months do I wait for a reply ? Also as said before I'm doing away with emails as spam companies keep blocking emails to and from my server (and stripe). So emailing asking for corrections most of the time just doesn't work. It could flag up as an error in the exxos store tab, but 90% of people do not check the tracking even, so any other information will go ignored anyway.

I suggest people enter their addresses in their forum profile and be logged in when they visit the store. This way your address gets copied over from your profile (assuming you enter your address correctly there that is!). I could force people to register and fill out information and it will be verified manually before store purchases are allowed, but again, it's more work for everybody. Overall, I am running out of options to fix this problem and the only way is to charge for the service of fixing it all for people.

[viking272]

Can you not make City / State mandatory part of the order process? E.g. the order won't get processed unless they fill out that part of the form?

[exxos]

Can you not make City / State mandatory part of the order process? E.g. the order won't get processed unless they fill out that part of the form?

I had that originally.. Was a long discussion about it a year or two ago.. It had to be removed for various reasons. I think something like not all addresses actually had a city/state or something.. It does not help when some people's addresses are different lengths. So people were just typing in N/A or duplicating parts of the address or other crazy stuff

The mandatory field is basically name and first line of the address (aside from email and postcode) so people were clicking complete order and it was only flagging up as one mine was missing, they could easily think complete and check out. But that is all I could do. If I make one more box mandatory, regardless of what the box is called or which box it is, it causes other problems anyway.

I was trying to find some sort of address verification thing, but it looks like they will be paid for services. Plus it's the time and integrating it and testing etc it's a load of work I really do not want to do because people cannot enter their addresses properly.

I think at the end of the day the addresses just need " human verification" . While we can fix a lot of it ourselves, should not be having to do this work in the first place, and it becomes a service which we really need to charge for because of the time involved. Then another solution is to do a blanket charge and just simply charge everyone £1 more, which is unfair for the people who do actually put their address in properly. But I'm basically at the point of having to employ someone to deal with all this chaos.

I do appreciate the suggestion, but this has been ongoing for some years now and this is just getting beyond ridiculous Other than charging for this as a service I do not really see any other way around it.

[viking272]

Ah i see.
I wonder if the City and State aren't added then you can parse the address to a window with Google Maps to see if it locates the adress?

Something like this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/274 ... -a-browser

Then have a message about consider adding more address fields?

I appreciate postal delivery is different to Google but there is a lot of convergence of postal address data and Google Maps is global.

In the UK I was surprised to find out the Post Office dropped using County (like the US States) for deliveries since 1996. (Or so the Post Office Address admins said when I queried why my new house didn't have county on the official address.)

[exxos]

Is a good thought. It may help automate finding out people's addresses quicker. But really should not be having to go to these lengths in the first place

I will have to talk to my girlfriend tomorrow and see what the problem was with the city/state/region box, we ended up removing boxes from being mandatory for multiple reasons. But maybe the "lesser evil" is to actually have that box mandatory

But I think people will still managed to mess it up. They will probably put N/A in the box and not fill it in elsewhere anyway.

I think this always comes down to the problem that there are never any solutions to anything in life. Only shifting the problem elsewhere

[mikro]

What about making a two-step process? I.e. I order something from your shop, you get a notification, if it's OK, you click on payment request. If not, you click on generic "your address is incomplete" button and that would send an email to that person.

That way emails can get lost but nobody's money would be on the table so you are free to do whatever you like. Now you are obliged to solve it immediately, because people have already paid you.

Having said that, I completely understand your frustration. It's a great sociology study to observe all the issues with having an eshop.

[exxos]

Thanks for the suggestion, but such a two-step progress would require manual intervention on every order which would create more work than solving the addresses problem manually in the first place. Plus I would have to rewrite a significant part of my web store to integrate such a thing

It is true most people will not get all read the emails. You basically have to assume that nobody will ever read or reply to any email sent. So any sort of interaction with the customer basically does not happen.

Another problem is if payment is done later, people will think they have paid and start emailing me complaining they have not had their order yet, when in reality they have not paid for it in the first place Then there will be outstanding orders could drag on for months. Do I cancel it and put stuff back on stock or what.. Again it starts creating a lot of confusion because of all the "delays" involved.

The only thing I can do is a confirm your address page, but the problem is people just won't read it anyway. I did have a pop-up box to do this a couple years ago in fact, but I took it out because people were just clicking "OK" without reading it anyway.

I did consider the automated system similar to what you suggest, in that my girlfriend could click a button to send them an email saying they are address needs confirming.. But it goes back to the whole problem of using emails.. Then waiting days weeks or months for them to reply.. We just end up with a load of orders "in limbo" all the time. Any sort of customer interaction externally to the checkout process pretty much always ends up in chaos

Aside from the emails not working reliably, people could login to the forum to view transaction problems and progress etc. but again 90% of people are not logged into the forum when they check out and the majority of people are not checking the status of their orders as well. We get no end of packages bounced back because " attempted delivery" multiple times, they do not collect the package and it bounces back. I just gave up emailing people telling them about this, because it was turning into a full-time job again. Plus again, a lot of people would not get the emails or read them anyway.

I did also consider a "sod it" order button, to automate cancellation and returns of funds to people and just not bother at all. Just cancel the order and automatically return stuff to stock. But again it would take a significant amount of time to integrate those changes into the store. And I think Stripe would likely complain at some point because I'm refunding half of the orders I am getting, plus transaction charges are not refundable either. So that would probably end up in a load of other disputes.

If people would just take five seconds to look at their address properly there will be no problems at all. It's all becoming increasingly frustrating from start to end Whatever changes are made, it just shifts the problem elsewhere and people just doing different dumb things instead. It all has been ongoing for years now it always comes back to the end of manually checking addresses, which takes time, and thus ends up becoming a chargeable service. Short of introducing a "stupidity tax" on every order, I do not really see there is much options left. But like I said earlier, it is unfair for the people who do actually put their address in correctly, but that is on a rapid decline these days anyway. But what else can I really do

[Badwolf]

Can you not make City / State mandatory part of the order process? E.g. the order won't get processed unless they fill out that part of the form?

I had that originally.. Was a long discussion about it a year or two ago.. It had to be removed for various reasons. I think something like not all addresses actually had a city/state or something.. It does not help when some people's addresses are different lengths. So people were just typing in N/A or duplicating parts of the address or other crazy stuff

I can sympathise with that one (I do post for a living, but fortunately we get paid to send and paid if they come back RTS too ).

For example, I have a three line address.

Eg (not real):

6 Borked Close
Twickenham
TW1 1XX

So when a website asks for a 'State/Province' [you can tell it's targeting the North American market] I put 'Middlesex'. That's technically wrong, but only because the postcode supplanted the county in our case. It'll probably get there. That's how I've always done it.

Then one day GoDaddy (I think it was) reject my order because my address is wrong. They tell me:

Middlesex doesn't exist.

Well, the place does, but the political entity doesn't. Ask the cricket club, I say. They don't understand.

OK, well politically I'm in Greater London. That has nothing to do with the address, but go ahead and put that.

No, that's not on the list either.

OK, so what's on your list?

Surrey?

Definitely not. I'm *north* of the river, you hooligans. Also they're not my county council.

...

We finally put 'London', which isn't right on any level and could definitely cause post to go walkies, but the only option their system would allow. FFS.

Anyway, my suggestion, if you're using a tracked service, is to post it anyway and tell the postmaster dude to mind his own business. Customer will have to pay for the resend if it gets RTSd and they can see where it's been I the meantime.

BW

[mrbombermillzy]

Middlesex doesn't exist.

Certainly does. I used to live there! It's where I grew up.

First time I ever saw an ST was at a mate's house in Middlesex which had a demo of a video captured doll rotating on the screen. (To this day, I still don't know what that demo was).

When I used to live there, (well, just up the road...South Ruislip) it used to be called the 'London Borough of Hillingdon'.

Sorry guys. Mentioning Middx got me all nostalgic. I couldn't help myself. Please, ignore me and carry on.