Introduction

Too often we see orders with incomplete or wrong addresses. This can lead to delays in order preparation (the shipping label can not be generated, our operator has to correct it on the spot loosing valuable time), delays in delivery and/or extra costs (the carrier can charge address correction surcharge, up to €10 per parcel). 

Address Problems

In the end it is always your client's responsibility to provide a correct address but we understand that clients might be in a hurry to place an order and do not always compile the address form in the way you intended. We suspect that many errors have one or more of the following three causes: 

1. Shopify's or the web browser's automatic address completion functionality fills the various fields with incomplete or wrong details, and the client does not double check;
   • We sometimes receives information including emoji's or in non-Western characters (Cyrillic, Arab, etc)
2. Customers who do "not know" where they live:
   • many (Italian) clients prefer to provide their "frazione" (hamlet) instead of "comune" (city/town). Unfortunately their are over 20 "frazioni" named "San Donato" in Italy. Most carriers insist that we provide the "comune" in combination with a matching ZIP-code and province;
3. Customers who provide too much information in the name or address fields, below some anonymised examples of what we have received: 
   • "Mario Rossi (o quando non sono a casa andate dal mio fratello in Via Repubblica 23)"
   • "Via San Vincenzo della Tempesta Numero 5, terza casa a sinistra con cancello rosso dopo la chiesa" which means 3rd house on the left with red gate after the church.
   • All carriers have a maximum number of characters per address field, some will simply ignore everything after xx characters, others refuse to generate a label if a field contains more than y characters.

Our Solution

In order to detect as much problems as possible and to avoid delays and extra costs for you we have developed an Address Verification Script that verifies the delivery addresses of the orders that have been imported/created/synchronised on our system, OngoingWMS. Typically during working hours the script runs every 5 minutes. 

Note: the script will never be perfect and thus there will be wrong addresses that pass the filter and there will be correct addresses that might be marked wrongfully as erroneous. Please help us to improve our script by collecting the problems you find and email them to our support.

On request clients can also request an API-connection to this Script so they can verify addresses before uploading/syncing orders to OngoingWMS. 

The Address Verification Script verifies an address in a few steps:

1. does the street field contain a house number;
2. do city, zip-code and province match (we verify this against an official database with Italian towns, zip-codes and provinces). In some occassions we are able to correct the information, if 2 of the 3 fields match we can correct the 3rd field within some limits;
3. are certain field lengths respected (name can not be longer then 35 characters);

Most Common Address Errors

If the script has detected one or more problems and was unable to correct this, the order will receive order status "AddressError" and an explanation of what is wrong is given in the Comment Field. Most common errors are: 

• House number not valid: the address does not contain a house number
• Zip-Code 12345 not valid: the ZIP-code does not match the combination City and Province
• Province not valid: the Province does not match the combination City and ZIP. Hint: Shopify does not offer the province Sud-Sardegna in its pull-down list so clients in this province are forced to choose a wrong province;
• Address is too short: there is no (valid) street address, the client probably forgot to enter it;
• City Xyz not found: the name in the city field does not exist as an official "comune" in Italy. Most likely the client provided the frazione in which he/she lives.