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Why Non-Latin Characters in Shopify Shipping Addresses Cause Carrier Errors and Fulfillment Failures

The Problem You Never Saw Coming

If you've run a Shopify store for any length of time and ship internationally, you know that addresses that contain non-Latin or non-Roman characters can cause real headaches. Customers from Greece write their address in Greek. Buyers from Russia type in Cyrillic. A big order from Japan comes in with Japanese characters. Shopify's checkout sees no issues with the address, the order goes through, and then you get stuck having to deliver a package that international carriers just won't ship.

No matter who you try, DHL, UPS, or FedEx, the foreign script throws a monkey wrench in the process forcing you to cancel orders that can't be shipped, deal with angry customers that won't get that item they so wanted, and at times eat unnecessary extra costs.

Why Carriers Require Latin Characters

This isn't shipping carriers intentionally making things difficult for ecommerce store owners. The global shipping infrastructure relies heavily on the Latin alphabet. The Universal Postal Union (UPU), this is the specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates mail between countries, expects information on international shipments to be written in Latin script, or at least include a Latin-script version.

DHL, FedEx, and UPS have to follow that standard. Non-Latin characters in a shipping address get flagged at some point during the shipping process, causing the parcel to get delayed or outright rejected, which means customer service nightmares for the seller.

Shopify Doesn't Handle This For You

Shopify doesn't flag non-Latin characters in the shipping address fields. One reason for this could be that domestic shipments in countries using non-Latin scripts are handled by local carriers and do not require the Latin alphabet. This only becomes an issue for international orders.

What Merchants Usually Try First (And Why It Doesn't Work)

Adding a checkout note: Shopify does offer a way for merchants to add a note on the checkout page requesting customers not to include any non-Latin characters in the shipping address. And while some may heed the request, others can still ignore it. People who use non-Latin scripts might not even understand what the note means.

Manually editing orders after the fact: This is what most merchants end up doing. They go through the orders for the day, inspect the address for each order, and if they see non-Latin characters, they'll either contact the customer and request a corrected address, or use a transliteration tool like the free Latin Address Converter to manually convert the address.

While this can do the trick for low-order-volume stores, larger stores might find it an absolute time sink or simply impossible to manage.

Rejecting and refunding orders: There are merchants who simply choose not to deal with the headache and instead cancel and refund orders with non-Latin script in the address. This, of course, leads to revenue losses.

The Safest and Most Reliable Way to Actually Prevent It

There's only one solid way to handle this issue and that is to attack it at the source by catching non-Latin characters during checkout. This is done by prompting the buyer to replace invalid characters as they're entered and before the order is placed.

This calls for a Shopify checkout app that runs at the point of entry, checks all address fields for disallowed characters, and returns a clear error message to the buyer before they complete the purchase.

LatinLock was created specifically to do just that. It validates the shipping address fields at checkout - first name, last name, address line 1, address line 2, and city (the state field is a dropdown menu, and the zip field is checked by Shopify's own software) - and blocks the checkout progress if non-Latin characters are detected. The customer is immediately shown a clear message explaining what needs to be corrected. Once the correction is made, the checkout goes through.

The app also allows for some customization. Merchants can define a set of characters that are normally disallowed by the app and allow them in the address. They can also customize the error messages shown to the customer.

LatinLock works on all Shopify stores, including standard plans, not just Shopify Plus.

What Makes a Good Solution

Whatever approach you decide on, it should:

  • Validate the address at checkout before the order is placed. Merchants can change the address afterward, but then they're really not shipping to the address that the buyer provided.
  • Clearly inform the customer what the error is and in which field.
  • Allow you to customize the error message to reflect your own tone.
  • Let the merchant define exceptions. For instance, allowing accented Latin characters like é, ü, or ñ, which are used in many European addresses and don't pose an issue for the merchant.
  • Not require Shopify Plus, unlike many Shopify checkout apps.

The Bottom Line

If you ship internationally through the likes of DHL, UPS, FedEx, and others, non-Latin characters in shipping addresses can be a real source of hassle for both yourself and your customers. Shopify doesn't handle the issue. A note on the checkout page won't help much. Manually changing each problematic address is labor-intensive and not safe since you're technically not shipping to the address entered by your buyer.

The safest and most reliable fix is to have a mechanism in place that deals with this at checkout and before the order is placed, not after.

If you run a Shopify store and have to deal with this issue, give LatinLock a try. It's free for 3 days and can be installed from the Shopify App Store. You can see it in action by watching this video. It demos the app in detail.