Limit Number of Characters per line in ship to address

[GlobalMarketGuru]

Shopsite seems to allow on-line customers an unlimited number of characters when putting in a ship to address on each address line. This creates major problems with all the courier services and shipping companies. All Shipping programs that print labels have a limit to the number of characters on each line of an address. USPS, UPS, Fed Ex and Avery Labels all have limits to the number of characters on the address lines. After about 32 characters these programs just truncated the address and print the label with an incomplete address. You have plenty of address lines in shopsite to accomodate any address if one uses the Company line. When a package ships to a bad address it wastes the postage, creates ill will with the end customer and the package is often lost creating enormous costs to the company providing the product. Since we all use shipping services and courier services, all shopsite users must have the same issue.

I strongly suggest shopsite provide a way to limit the number of characters in each address line to 32 and force a customer using shopsite to do the rest of the address on another line. Or just set an arbitrary limit of say 32 characters which is where most programs start truncating the address line in the various shipping programs.

Also, Shopsite would be well advised to add a third address line to the address options, just like USPS, UPS and FedEX do in their online programs.

We urgently need your help. Letting customers fill out address lines with 80 to 100 characters is a formula for disaster. Shopsite, we need your help with making the number of characters in the ship to address lines compatible with the major shipping companies. It is costing us shopsite users a lot of money in wasted postage, lost packages and customer ill will. Please treat this as urgent. We need the Shopsite programmers to a address the number of characters allowed at check out. Please fix this soon.

Thank You for listening and providing a solution to this urgent shipping problem! Please help, as we expand internationally we run into this more and more as international customers seem to have a propensity to putting a lot of information on each line.

WE need your help shopsite

[BFChris]

Shopsite doesn't have a built-in way to do this, but it can easily be done with Javascript.

Here's an awesome tutorial and pre-written script from the great guys at Lexiconn:

http://support.lexiconn.com/news/viewtopic.php?t=459

[GlobalMarketGuru]

Thanks Chris,

Agreed, The guys at Lexiconn are great and have helped put in the right limits on my shopsite software, but I still maintain it should be something that Shopsite should provide as part of the program out of the box.

I just found out after doing a lot of digging what the limits are for Endicia and UPS software for printing labels. Here they are for anyone else who needs to know for setting up the character limits using the javascrip method above and if Shopsite programers are paying attention, these are the limits that should come with the software out of the box.

You can ship anywhere in the world using this number of characters within these limitations set by Endicia and UPS, so there is no reason to have more characters available, it just leads to trouble when an end user puts to many characters on one line and none on the other lines, key information gets truncated in the shipping address by the shipping programs and you have a lost package with all the costs and ill will associated with lost packages.

Endicia and UPS Character Limits for printing shipping address labels:

First Name = 15 characters
Last Name = 20 characters
Company = 38 characters
Address 1 = 38 characters
Address 2 = 38 characters

I hope this helps others to know where the character limits fall.

[ShopSite David]

In ShopSite v11 sp2 the merchant can now specify the number of characters that can be entered in the address fields.