Why aiku asks for a full address

What counts as a complete address

An address is not the same thing in every country, so aiku asks for what that country uses and nothing more:

• United Kingdom — street, town and postcode.
• Ireland — street and town. No postcode is asked for, because Irish addresses do not use one in this format.
• Spain and Italy — street, town, province and postcode.
• United Arab Emirates — street and emirate. No town.

This comes from the same country list that decides which boxes appear on the form, so the boxes you see are the boxes you need to fill. The boxes also come in the order that country writes an address — for the UK, street first, then town, then postcode. A single 0 does not count as an address; it used to be accepted and it is what printed as zeros on paperwork.

You will be asked for a complete address anywhere a person types one: signing up on a shop website, a customer editing their own details, adding a delivery address, editing a customer or an order or an invoice in the office, and on the shop, supplier, agent, warehouse and company screens.

Orders arriving on their own from a sales channel — Shopify, eBay, Amazon, TikTok and the rest — are never refused for an incomplete address. Their payment is already taken elsewhere, so refusing them would lose the order. The same goes for the overnight data imports.

What happens when a customer has no address

Some accounts were created before this was asked for, so they have no address at all. When one of them orders:

1. The customer pays as normal. Payment is never refused for a missing address.
2. The order is submitted as normal.
3. It stops before the warehouse. No delivery note is created, so there is nothing to pick and nothing to pack.
4. It stays in the submitted list with a warning on its warehouse note that names the missing address — nearly always the billing address.

A held order can still show a perfectly good delivery address. On most shops the two are separate: the delivery address is where the parcel goes, the billing address belongs to the customer's account. If the warning says the billing address is missing, that is the one to fix, whatever the delivery box shows.

Nothing is lost and nobody is charged for something they will not receive — the order simply waits for somebody to sort the address out.

Releasing a held order

When the billing address is missing: put it on the customer. Open the customer, add their address, and every order of theirs held for a missing billing address picks it up and carries on to the warehouse by itself. Prefer this, because it also fixes every future order that account places.

When the delivery address is missing, or for one order only: put it on the order. Open the order and edit the address the warning names. On a dropshipping order the delivery address is the end customer's, so it can only be fixed on the order. As soon as the order has what it needs, it goes to the warehouse on its own.

If you press Send to warehouse while an address is still missing, aiku tells you so rather than doing nothing.

When the customer cannot be reached

Sometimes there is no reply and the goods have to go. A held order has a Send anyway, no address button. It does what it says: the order goes to the warehouse and is picked, packed and dispatched as normal, and a line is added to its warehouse note recording that it was sent deliberately without an address.

Use it as the last resort, because of what follows it: the invoice for that order will show only the country in the address box. That paperwork cannot be changed once it is issued, so it is worth one more attempt at reaching the customer first.

Why this matters

Before this, an account with no address produced an invoice with zeros where the address should be, and it happened a few times a day, every day. The customer receives a document that looks broken; nobody notices unless they look. The address is also what the invoice is billed to, so an empty one is a real gap in the paperwork rather than a cosmetic one.