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Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

medium.com

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Re: Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

#31

Post by lagadu »

teekert wrote: post #7

It's funny, even in the Netherlands we feel a (tiny, tiny) bit of this: all foreign websites have address entry systems that always ask for a state/province (and even faithfully produce a list of all our provinces). We indeed have them but locals ignore them entirely, city, street, number and postal code are all we, and domestic companies, use.

Same for Denmark, technically we do have regions but they're not even worth writing on any address. Same goes for Portugal, where I've lived: no state/province/region exists; on forms stupid enough to require that you just end up putting the city name again. Same goes for requiring city and postcode.

Re: Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

#32

Post by sellweek »

sharpercoder wrote: post #12

I have also encountered web forms which must validate my address. Turns out, the backing database did not contain my address. I could not order at the store. After contacting the store, they told me that their data was always accurate and therefore I must be a fraud.

I once needed to replace an expired health insurance card but since I don't live in the same country where my health insurance is registered, I called the company to inquire about whether it's possible to have the card shipped to another country. Of course it is! Just enter your address into a form in their Easy And Convenient Online System. Turns out, their system wouldn't process the request unless it validated the address. It seems the company paid for a version of the database which contained house-level details from my home country but other countries only had cities listed. That meant I could enter the city and then I could use a dropdown to pick one of the zero streets the system knew about. Suffice to say, I didn't get my health insurance card.

Re: Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

#33

Post by gcb0 »

haha. great irony: the medium.com site showed me a page with a google captcha. I clicked it, and it asked me to identify cars or something. so I just hit the back button, left this comment and realised I did not have to read such a click baity titled article.

I guess captcha before showing an ad-ridden site is 70% of the reason I don't read bad articles. thanks medium-google-cloudflare.

Re: Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

#34

Post by farah9 »

simias wrote: post #17
vezycash wrote: post #4

I checked out the linked https://plus.codes/individuals Steps for creating a Plus Code are: 1. Open the Google Maps app. 2. Touch and hold a place to drop a pin on Google Maps. 3. At the bottom, you’ll see an address or a plus code. Tap this section to find all details of the location and copy the plus code. If the primary use case is creating an address for my current location - e.g. Home. Then, the instructions are…

I agree with your feedback but even beyond that the "Enter city or plus code" form seems broken. I went to a random place in mongolia, I got a plus code of "5PJF+FJQ" and when I enter it in the form it doesn't work: https://plus.codes/5PJF+FJQ I think it's a nice concept though, I could see myself using something like that if it became more mainstream, it's a little more convenient than GPS coordinates if you want to…

It works if you append the plus code with a comma followed by the country name.

Re: Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

#35

Post by baud147258 »

JeanMarcS wrote: post #10

In France (don’t know how it works elsewhere) shops can be a shipping point. It creates a network for transporters and it’s a must have for any online shop. If the transporter ships directly to your home, you have to be here when he comes (and in France you never really know...). If you haven’t bought large furniture or fridge or whatever, it’s simpler to go to a shop, it’s open on a wide range of hours. For the shop…

I agree that delivery at a drop point can be useful to sidestep the post office random delivery time.

Re: Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

#36

Post by gumby »

teekert wrote: post #7

It's funny, even in the Netherlands we feel a (tiny, tiny) bit of this: all foreign websites have address entry systems that always ask for a state/province (and even faithfully produce a list of all our provinces). We indeed have them but locals ignore them entirely, city, street, number and postal code are all we, and domestic companies, use.

Even in the US I typically just address a letter these days (when I send one) with name and zip code. I’ve been doing this for decades.

Re: Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

#37

Post by contravariant »

cr1895 wrote: post #27
teekert wrote: post #7

It's funny, even in the Netherlands we feel a (tiny, tiny) bit of this: all foreign websites have address entry systems that always ask for a state/province (and even faithfully produce a list of all our provinces). We indeed have them but locals ignore them entirely, city, street, number and postal code are all we, and domestic companies, use.

Postal code and number is sufficient, isn’t it?

Yes, but the city and street are typically provided for clarity / redundancy.

Some fancy webpages fill them in automatically.

Re: Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

#38

Post by crispyambulance »

sharemywin wrote: post #6

How does mail carriers deliver packages? what do they use?

That becomes the real question if websites accept plus-codes as valid shipping addresses.

How will you know whether or not a mail-system in a remote location will even know what a plus code is, and then, be equipped with that technology on an individual carrier basis?

Are these just pie-in-the-sky proposals or are people using them now?

Re: Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

#39

Post by baud147258 »

liotier wrote: post #30
angarg12 wrote: post #24

The first time that I went on vacation to Africa I was mindblown. The concept of city, town or even village broke down for me; one of the places where I was staying was just a streak of houses dispersed more or less close to a single road. Addresses were hardly a thing, people just knew where each one lived, so you had to ask for 'xyz house'. I don't want to sound PC but this is the kind of reasons why more diversity…

> one of the places where I was staying was just a streak of houses dispersed more or less close to a single road You were in America actually...

That's not just in America, part of Europe can qualify too.

Except that they might have addresses.

Re: Online shopping in Africa doesn’t work because of shipping and billing forms

#40

Post by bbrazil »

JeanMarcS wrote: post #16
teekert wrote: post #7

It's funny, even in the Netherlands we feel a (tiny, tiny) bit of this: all foreign websites have address entry systems that always ask for a state/province (and even faithfully produce a list of all our provinces). We indeed have them but locals ignore them entirely, city, street, number and postal code are all we, and domestic companies, use.

In Magento, you can choose by country if you want this field or not. So I guess it’s true for most of the online shop solutions. But as stated by others (about Ireland in their example), even companies that had their hq there asked for zip code at a time there was not any. So I guess if you start shipping internationally, it’s a big job to make a form that fits every cases. I wonder if someone have made a list of tho…

> But as stated by others (about Ireland in their example), even companies that had their hq there asked for zip code at a time there was not any.

Post codes are not generally used in Ireland. The launch was not really successful and even An Post (the government-run postal service) doesn't use them.

Irish counties are fun, as the traditional 26 counties (in the Republic) don't align with the thirty-something administrative counties that now exist.

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