Woocommerce-services: Inability to bypass address validation on USPS Shipping WooServices

[lstevens1976]

Recently a customer I'm working with had an issue on there site and this is not an unheard of thing, just uncommon.

He had a customer place an order with a valid mailing address that would not validate or come up with an alternate address in wooservices USPS shipping.

We are trying to centralize everything for him and this creates a problem. He went to Paypal and was able to create the label and the customer received the package correctly. Paypal showed a ? that it failed validation but allowed him to print. Wooservices would not even go past the address.

This is an issue and it does need fixed. Warnings in place would be fine saying "You are overriding USPS validation and this may cause the package to not be delivered or delivered incorrectly" or something like that.

But the choice and option needs to be there.

[dechov]

The shipping service through which validation is done also recommends against mandating successful verification.

As we understand it, they update their data with USPS's latest addresses once per month, which suggests new listing as a common reason for validation to fail on valid addresses.

Thanks for reporting this :+1:

[jeffstieler]

Unverifiable addresses present in a few different ways:

We need a path forward for users to use the address as entered in the case that we can't automatically verify it. Ping @kellychoffman for some design help here.

[dechov]

For reference, previous design input regarding messaging in this view was in https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso/pull/20167

[jeffstieler]

Perhaps something akin to this screen might make sense:

We could attempt to link to the USPS verification form for double checking, I'll look into that.

[v18]

Another report in 1166378-zen

[v18]

Why this is happening:

My best guess as to what's happening here is that this is a new address that's been recently added to the USPS database, and we have not loaded that data yet.

There's no way to manually add addresses, so we need to allow users to skip address validation.

[v18]

+1 here: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/awful-reports-no-additional-services-or-return-labels/#post-10306431

[kellychoffman]

Once a user validates the address and an error is found, we should add a link to the error message that allows them to proceed with the address anyways.

[jeffstieler]

Once a user validates the address and an error is found, we should add a link to the error message that allows them to proceed with the address anyways.

Since this won't be a blocking state, should we change the error treatment to be a warning instead? Orange or blue perhaps?

[lstevens1976]

I like the idea of the error warning but I think it needs to actually have a place to click yes that specifically says the address has failed validation.

I think the point being is that they need to confirm that they understand the address failed validation and they are proceeding anyways. It makes them double-check the address and if they don't it's on them.

And a link to the actual error that is kicking back would be nice as well but probably doesn't need to be as prominent because that's more of a troubleshooting thing.

The person I'm working with and started this over knew the addresses were valid and did the shipping through PayPal where you do have to click that confirmation.

[kellychoffman]

I like the idea of the error warning but I think it needs to actually have a place to click yes that specifically says the address has failed validation.

@lstevens1976: Could you explain this more? Not sure I'm following.

Since this won't be a blocking state, should we change the error treatment to be a warning instead? Orange or blue perhaps?

@jeffstieler: Good call. Warning feels better.

[jeffstieler]

This is ready for review in the referenced PR:

[jeffstieler]

Reopening until we update the Calypso refspec.

[marcinbot]

Calypso refspec has been updated and the change has been released. Closing.

[mariagarciaa]

+1 here: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/awful-reports-no-additional-services-or-return-labels/#post-10306431

Informative resource. Thanks for sharing