Shipstation Address Validation Wrong

[otherindustries]

I recently had this happen 3 times with shipstation. The shopify order imports with the correct address, but once in shipstation it auto validates it and switches it to a "validated" address but the address is totally wrong. I've had 3 customers reach out about this. It's very concerning. Any thoughts?

[orangeumbrella]

We turned off address validation for this reason.  It was completely deleting post office boxes and street address lines.  I am SICK of having to open up support tickets with shipstation for stuff like this so we turned it off.

We had TWO customers reach out to us before we did that.  It's highly concerning.

Now we validate each order manually and check to make sure it's not deleting/omitting anything. And we ship between 50-100 jobs a day. Ridiculous.

[MBC]

Is it possible that the addresses in question were in New York? We've had this happen a number of times, and in each case, it's because the customer put "New York" as the city name in their shipping address, rather than the appropriate NYC borough (e.g. Brooklyn). What we usually see is that it will try to find the closest matching street name in *Manhattan* - not the exact same street name by the way - and override the zip code entirely.

In general though, we see this happen randomly every few weeks with non-NYC addresses as well, particularly international ones.

[sales28]

We've had the same issue with a customer from NJ that shipstation imported as NY. 

[orangeumbrella]

The only one I remember specifically was puerto rico. It was getting returned to us for an autocorrected (incorrectly) address so the poor customer had to wait about 3.5 weeks to get her order.

[TPRS_Books]

We just had an order the other week where ShipStation completely erased the second address line which listed the PO box number. Because of this, the shipment was returned to us, and the customer was very upset about the entire situation.

Does anyone know if ShipStation is working on fixing this issue, or is the only solution to turn address validation off?

[CaraAdmin]

Hello otherindustries! 

We appreciate your post and bringing this to our attention. We are not currently seeing this as a documented issue, so if you wouldn't mind, please reach out to support@shipstation.com when this occurs so we can report the issue correctly. 

Thank you again, and we appreciate you!

Happy Shipping!

-Cara

[bparker]

I have been asking for  your team to address this Validation Error issue for 15+ Years. We have no way to over ride the Address Validations, even when we know they are wrong, and now we can't even select the correct method when the address is validated. 

The Address get's validated as Commercial, but it is Residential. I have asked for a feature to Manually Override this for many years, with nothing. This is costing our company a lot of money in shipping re-bills as many of our customers are repeat customers so we get re-billed the difference for the wrong shipping methods. I tried setting up an automation rule that notifies us of these specific customer orders, but now I found a new issue. Shipstation does not even allow you to choose a Home Delivery Method or select the Residential Button when they have been validated as commercial, but are actually residential. So now we can't even choose the correct method manually when processing the order. This is a huge issue that needs to be fixed. We should be able to over ride this validation. Please advise.

[CaraAdmin]

Hello @bparker!

Thank you for your community post! I’ve asked a support agent to contact you directly regarding this issue.

Here’s our information: the “unknown error” related to address validation occurs when the address validator returns an undefined or blank value. In these cases, the system defaults to selecting the first available option—typically "Commercial"—in the UI.

The good news is that we’re releasing an update this week allowing users to manually select “Residential” or “Commercial” when the returned value is blank or unknown. This should help avoid confusion and give you more control when processing those addresses.

Thanks again for bringing this up, and we’ll keep you posted as the update rolls out!

We appreciate your patience!

-Cara