Unicode (non-Roman characters) support

[howard]

We have a company store that sells to the world market. Countries in Asia (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) use 2-byte, non-Roman, unicode characters in their names and addresses. These address will have last characters filtered or altered when printed. It is annoying and risky to loss, not able to print them properly. As more and more companies sells internationally, it is good to prepare ShipStation ready for world markets.

[kristine3]

Currently, orders containing addresses with foreign characters such as ó, ƒ, Ê, _ and many others are being imported into shipstation in a garbled way. Shipstation actually does "support" most of the common international characters if you paste them in to the orders which is time-consuming and cumbersome. It just doesn't import csv files correctly as UTF-8. Basic foreign characters such as ones used in Latin America and Europe are very necessary for international shipping. Please fix this.

[shipping279]

I agree with this. We are in Québec Canada with a lot of names and addresses containing "é,è,ê,à,etc." Please fix, it's not efficient to have double check all my addresses and client names.

[nuidojec]

I too have same problem. Russian characters are indicated as question marks. Please fix this.

[brian46]

Yes, please fix this! For example, Russian characters are shown as "???????" This is frustrating, time consuming, and often appears unprofessional since we have to cross out the ???? and hand-write the name.

[steveo]

This thread has become about two separate issues. It started with importing Latin characters that are not part of English. However, other people have complained about Cryllic characters appearing as question marks. I think that they may be different problems that both need fixing. I have the Cryllic alphabet issue. They import correctly from the marketplaces, but print as question marks (ie ??????) instead of the proper character. This is not ShipStation's fault, but due to a postal regulation that requires Latin characters on labels, so the problem applies equally to other non-Latin alphabets. My manual workaround is to first paste the original address into Internal Notes (to help recover from errors), then paste the address into Google translate and then paste the translated address into the ShipStation fields. Google Translate and other translation services have easy to use APIs. ShipStation should use one to automatically duplicate my manual process.

[support241]

We need this as well. Foreign characters for Germany, Australia, Canada, and others.

[steveo]

Any updates here? We'll soon be on Amazon Japan. The manual correction of each address will be a time consuming process.

[feedback]

Hey @pricedright - After re-reading the original post ShipStation will accept UTF-8 character sets by default. You're able to select ANSI by selecting it in the menu when importing orders via CSV method. However there seems to be other character concerns here that we have yet to have the opportunity to research.

[steveo]

Thanks for the reply. Despite the OP's description of the problem, the real issue isn't which character set is supported by ShipStation, but which characters are supported by the postal service. As per the USPS Development Guide for their API (https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/general-api-developer-guide.htm), the only allowable charaters are from the ISO-8859-1 standard, which is essentially the first Unicode block of characters. It covers the alphabets of most Western European countries. That leaves out Cryllic, Hebrew, Arabic and most Asian languages. That's a real problem for those of us with broad international distribution. I think that my last post describes a good way to deal with the problem.

[pworthel]

we want to be able to upload via mass load CSV file addresses in non English characters (Chinese, Mandarin, Japanese, etc')