How To Force English-only Customer Shipping Information

Renee Hall

Renee Hall

Member
Greetings!

I received an order today from Germany. The street address and city name were written in German characters. I processed the order using auto whatever that is. When I was taken to the AliExpress page, I was greeted with red highlights around the street and city fields.

Woops! What's this? I wondered.

I learned that AliExpress orders can only be typed in the English language. Well, isn't that special! What's a girl to do?

I go to Google Translation and take my chances on the results just to get the order in. I then contacted the seller to explain my concern. The seller emailed me the prepared shipping label and asked me to have my customer verify before shipping. Love it! Very nice seller.

I asked the seller how they handle international addresses they receive. Well, to my surprise, I was informed that they, too, only accept addresses written in English. But I still have a dilemma. While the AliExpress platform forces you to use English characters only, my plug-in does not. How to make it so? That is the question!

Yaros, my guru, please help me avoid addresses typed like this: Mosenbergstraße and cities like this: Köln. I can't go through this headache again.

Thank you much!
 
Yaros

Yaros

Moderator
Staff member
nenene said:
I have posted about this, they don't seem to care much :p

https://forum.alidropship.com/threads/replace-diacritics-in-non-ascii-characters.2172/
https://forum.alidropship.com/threads/automatic-special-character-replace.2047/
Click to expand...
That's not true that we do not care about it. Getting hundreds of orders daily, we are facing with the same problems.

When we came across with this issue, the first thing we did was giving users a possibility to enter only letters in English. We thought that the problem had been solved successfully until we found out a great drop in sales from such countries like Germany, Sweden, France, etc. The conversion rate for these countries decreased dramatically.

That's the reason why we recovered the previous system and added the option for store administrator to edit customer's order details before placing order automatically.

gEyhAfl.png


The question is, would you prefer to spend one more minute of your time on such order or just refuse from this order and money at all?
 
mushrukh

mushrukh

Member
I completely agree with @Yaros and his team . It is never that they don`t care . They work hard for solving everyone`s problem to their best . They are human not GOD who can solve the problem with a blink of an eye . Just interact with them properly and calmly I am sure they will solve your issue
 
N

nenene

Member
Hello @Yaros , glad to see someone reply to this issue after my failed attempts.
Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy your products, also have aliplugin and used social rabbit in the past.
But let me tell you on what ELSE I spend one more minute of my time when fulfilling orders.

0) OK we covered the having to change the non English characters, and there are many more countries than Germany that this applies to, and the more orders the more time, not everyone targets USA.

1) I use PayPal expess and fields like Province/County are not required so they are left blank in Woo. The same goes for telephone number country code. So almost ALL of my UK orders stop auto - fulfillment, either because a) there is no Region b) there is no country code c) The postal code returned from PayPal is ABCDEDG instead of ABCD EFG that aliexpress wants

2) The same goes for Australia orders and the zip code, it needs Caps only

3) Only last week in Australia orders the auto complete State was implemented, 2 months later I posted about it

4) When selecting shipping method the plugin defaults to epacket, but I rarely use it, and yet again I have to manually select another method, and of course sometimes I don't notice it and I send the orders wrong.

5) Captcha on every order after a number of orders and up

So I'm asking you, does doing all the above for almost every order sound to you like an automated process?

Would appreciate your reply, thank you.
 
Last edited:
Yaros

Yaros

Moderator
Staff member
OK, I think we can make it optional, to make these fields for English letters only. However, the best solution here will be a converting module that will convert such letters to english ones. We will work on it.

Do you mean PayPal express checkout? May be there is a possibility to make these fields as required on Paypal side...

As for shipping method, we can't (technically) collect shipping method for each product. Since we and most of our clients are using epacket as a primary delivery option, this method is selected by default. What we can do is to give a possibility to select this default shipping method in the extension, but I am not sure if it helps.

Captcha. No solution here. We can make the auto ordering process work slowly to avoid it, but in this case it is faster to enter captcha.
 
N

nenene

Member
Yaros said:
OK, I think we can make it optional, to make these fields for English letters only. However, the best solution here will be a converting module that will convert such letters to english ones. We will work on it.

Well i'm on Woo version, so I just get the Information that Paypal Express sends back to Woo. Please check these resources:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18123501/replacing-accented-characters-with-plain-ascii-ones
http://web.archive.org/web/20121231...om:80/2011/05/06/script-to-remove-diacritics/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3371697/replacing-accented-characters-php


Do you mean PayPal express checkout? May be there is a possibility to make these fields as required on Paypal side...

Unfortunately there is not, can you make it default to "Other" when there the field is blank in Woocommerce? It's what I do manually every time.


As for shipping method, we can't (technically) collect shipping method for each product. Since we and most of our clients are using epacket as a primary delivery option, this method is selected by default. What we can do is to give a possibility to select this default shipping method in the extension, but I am not sure if it helps.

It would surely help a lot. I rarely use epacket and having the option to default to China Post would save me an unwanted step on EVERY order.


Captcha. No solution here. We can make the auto ordering process work slowly to avoid it, but in this case it is faster to enter captcha.
Click to expand...
 
Renee Hall

Renee Hall

Member
Greetings!

So glad to see the exchange of thoughts and reasons on this topic. As I am in the U.S., I don’t expect many international sales.

As a post-script to my initial post: My German customer confirmed that the translation of his address and city were correct. I'm very happy about that. Google translation worked this time and if it works for future orders, then my dilemma is now a non-dilemma. And I would be perfectly satisfied with a reliable language translation tool to use.

Another option would be to add a message to customers on my checkout page; like instructions to enter their address in English only? This would be a plug-in option that drop shippers can opt to use, like this:

Additional information

At least I could make an attempt to “encourage” the use of English only, and hope that customers will comply. This would not force the use of English only, and no one has to use this on their checkout page if they don’t want to.

Thoughts?

What are the chances that AliExpress might bend in our direction and accept foreign language?
:p:p:p:p:p:D:D:D:D:D
HA HA HA HA HA
 
N

nenene

Member
Yaros said:
Captcha. No solution here. We can make the auto ordering process work slowly to avoid it, but in this case it is faster to enter captcha.
Click to expand...

An intergration with something like this?
https://antcpt.com
It doesn't do too bad on Aliexpress.
EDIT: bought 5000 captcha solves for 5$, best 5$ ever.
 
Last edited:
Yaros

Yaros

Moderator
Staff member
Renee Hall said:
Greetings!

I received an order today from Germany. The street address and city name were written in German characters. I processed the order using auto whatever that is. When I was taken to the AliExpress page, I was greeted with red highlights around the street and city fields.

Woops! What's this? I wondered.

I learned that AliExpress orders can only be typed in the English language. Well, isn't that special! What's a girl to do?

I go to Google Translation and take my chances on the results just to get the order in. I then contacted the seller to explain my concern. The seller emailed me the prepared shipping label and asked me to have my customer verify before shipping. Love it! Very nice seller.

I asked the seller how they handle international addresses they receive. Well, to my surprise, I was informed that they, too, only accept addresses written in English. But I still have a dilemma. While the AliExpress platform forces you to use English characters only, my plug-in does not. How to make it so? That is the question!

Yaros, my guru, please help me avoid addresses typed like this: Mosenbergstraße and cities like this: Köln. I can't go through this headache again.

Thank you much!
Click to expand...
Done. https://forum.alidropship.com/threads/alidropship-ver-0-9-12-3-update.2837/
 
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