Validating shipping addresses on your orders

When your customers enter potentially invalid shipping address details when placing their order, the order displays the issues in your Shopify admin and makes suggestions to update the address details. Address validation suggestions are offered when there is high confidence in the address details that the customer intended. This helps you reduce orders with potentially invalid addresses, and minimize delayed or failed deliveries.

This feature validates your customer's shipping address after the order is placed. You can activate shipping address validation at checkout to prompt your customer to validate their shipping address before their order is placed.

Eligibility for shipping address validation

Shipping address validation happens automatically on all incoming online orders. Shipping address validation is available to all merchants on any plan.

The address validation feature is available for shipping addresses in the following countries:

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Bermuda
Czechia
Denmark
Faroe Islands
France
Guernsey
Italy
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Poland
Portugal
Slovenia
South Korea
Switzerland
United States

Orders from unsupported countries still have their addresses inspected, but might not return as many specific address validation suggestions as those from supported countries.

Filtering orders by address validation status

You can filter your Orders list to display orders by their shipping address validation status. Select Address validation as the order filter and choose which filters to apply to your order view:

Not validated: Displays orders that were excluded from address validation. These can include orders without shipping addresses.
Has issues: Displays orders with address validation warnings or errors.
No issues: Displays orders that were successfully validated.

Learn more about filtering orders.

Types of address validation issues

There are 2 main types of address validation issues:

Warnings: Indicated by a yellow icon, a warning might result in a delayed or failed delivery and should be updated before fulfilling the order.
Errors: Indicated by a red icon, an error is very likely to result in a delayed or failed delivery, and should be updated before fulfilling the order. Errors prevent you from marking the address as valid.

Use your discretion to determine when to mark a flagged address as valid. Fulfilling orders without resolving warnings or errors can result in delayed or failed order deliveries to your customer.

Resolving issues with shipping addresses

To reduce the risk of delayed or failed deliveries, resolve any shipping address validation warnings or errors in your orders. If you're unsure how to resolve the validation issue, then you can contact the customer directly by sending an email asking them for more information.

If there's an error on a shipping address, then you can't mark the address as valid.

Steps:

From your Shopify admin, go to Orders.
Click the order with a shipping address validation issue that you want to resolve.
In the Customer section, under Shipping address, click Review address issues.
Optional: If you want to contact the customer to confirm their address, then click Email customer to open an Email customer dialog. Learn more about contacting a customer about their order.
In the Edit shipping address dialog, the original shipping address displays with the address issue flagged, as well as the suggested valid shipping address. Resolve the address issue by doing any of the following options:
- With the Original option selected, click Mark as valid to accept the existing shipping address with no updates. This is only possible when there is no error to resolve.
- With the Suggestion option selected, click Use suggestion to automatically update the shipping address information.
- In the Original section, click Edit address to manually update the shipping address information. When you're done updating the address, click Save.