Ordered something that was gonna take a week to get here, and today it was supposed to arrive.
My package wasn’t here though; it turns out I forgot to put in the last number of my address on the shipping info and now it’s been sent back because it was a non-existent address :'( I also have to figure out what company I need to contact next week to update the delivery address for since USPS didn’t directly handle the package entirely. Sad day and mild inconveniences all around
I work in a e-commerce and the amount of people that forgets the street number is insane.
We send email to ask clarification: no response (probably filtered by the artificial stupidity classification in Gmail, everyone only reads the main category)
We call them to ask clarification: nobody picks up because they assume it’s telemarketing
I blame the Google chrome auto fill, because it fills the whole form automatically instead of line by line like on Firefox, so people assume that it’s filled correctly while instead the browser decided to omit the street number
There was also some sort of Chrome autofill for the Organization field that put people’s SSN in there. We resorted to naming the field “chromeDontAutofillThis” but we still see weird data in there.
There are ways to verify addresses exist and while an unknown address is possible, it should be extra work for the user to enter such an address such that it isn’t the browser autofilling to blame.
These databases are used for calculating taxes since someone on one side of the street can have a different tax rate than their neighbor on the other side of the street.
As a customer I hate those “smart” address form as they don’t accept my real house number but I need to put the generic one and hope the delivery guy is smart enough to read notes
If they do the form correctly, then it’s just an extra step for you to confirm. One flow I’ve seen that would accomplish this is:
- You enter your address into a form that can be auto-filled
- You submit the address
- If the address validates, the site saves the form and shows you the address in a more readable format. You can click Edit to make changes.
- If the address doesn’t validate, the site displays a modal asking you to confirm the address. If another address they were able to look up looks similar, it suggests you use that instead. It’s one click to continue editing, to use the suggested address, or to use what you originally entered.
That said, if you’re regularly seeing the wrong address pop up it may be worth submitting a request to get your address added to the database they use. That process will differ depending on your location and the address verification service(s) used by the sites that are causing issues. If you’re in the US, a first step is to confirm that the USPS database has your address listed correctly, as their database is used by some downstream address verification services like “Melissa.” I believe that requires a visit to your local post office, but you may be able to fix it by calling your region’s USPS Address Management System office.
Having worked customer support for a major shipping company the best thing to do is to update your address with the merchant you bought from.
I ended up doing that. They said they would refund me when it got returned back to their warehouse when I talked to support.