Customer getting error message during checkout

[Arcinspirations]

Hi there I had a customer report that she is getting a “cannot ship to this address” during checkout. I see during the abandoned orders page she has tried several times. 

I recently tried to change my shipping address I’m hoping this isn’t happening because I messed something up. My shipping was working great. 

I’m an author selling only one book via your website. I cannot afford to loose all incoming orders. can you help me?

[Ava]

Hey, @Arcinspirations!

I'm sorry to hear that, I'm sure we can get to the bottom of this for you. Can you share a link to your website with me here? I'd like to test the checkout myself to see if I can see the same error.

Also, can I ask how you have your rates currently set up? For example, are they set to assign a shipping rate depending on the weight of the items in the cart, or depending on the price of the cart? Just to make sure the rates cover the cost and weight of the cart order.

Changing the address shouldn't have an impact on the shipping rates, unless the address was the 'shipping from' address in the admin. If this address is changed and then set to the primary location, it's best to make sure that your shipping address is not in the 'not shipping from section. This is what it will look like in the admin:

You can check that your main location has rates set up if you go to Settings > Shipping and delivery, then click on Manage rates under the shipping header.

Let me know about the above and we can take things from there!

[Arcinspirations]

@Ava 
my website is:

www.AshleyChesney.org and then you’ll click order now on my book and it takes you to my Shopify account. 

my rates are determined by weight. 

thank you so much for responding.

[Ava]

Thanks for your response, @Arcinspirations!

I've checked out the store (looks great by the way!) and tested the checkout. I'm able to select a shipping rate once I enter a US address:

Was your customer trying to check out with more than one item? I'm just wondering if your rates reach a high enough weight to cover multiple items. It can sometimes happen that shipping rates go from 0-10lbs / 10lbs-20lbs only, but if a customer orders 30lbs worth of items, the shipping rate will not cover it.

Also, do you have any saved packages that have a weight added? For example, if you have a box that weighs 0.5lbs, that will be added to the total weight of the order too! So if you have rates that cover up to 20lbs, then the weight of the saved package is added, the total will be 20.5lbs; meaning the rate will not cover this checkout.

A handy way to check what your customer was seeing is if you go to your abandoned carts section and look for error messages in the order timeline. This will give you a better insight into what the specific error is. You can also copy the checkout link into a new browser tab to see what your customer sees at checkout. You can see this link here:

There is also the possibility the customer is accidentally adding the wrong address, this can happen if a customer adds an address in a format that the checkout does not recognise. You can test this yourself by taking the address the customer has added (you'll see this in their customer profile) and try checking out as far as the shipping rates using that address.

There is the option of creating a draft order for the customer if they can't checkout on their end too. You can create the order for them in the checkout, then send them the email link to the payment page so they can enter their payment details and order your product! There is a guide on how to do that here. 

Let me know how you get on with the steps above. If you try all of those and the error is still showing, we can chat about the next steps at that stage!

[Arcinspirations]

@Ava 

two customer who I know personally,  have abandoned checkouts. When i reached out to them they at old me when they tried to pay via credit card it would not allow them too. Both have Georgia addresses. One said the item could not be shipped to their address. They are only trying to purchase one item. But one tried to do it multiple times resulting in multiple abandoned carts. I have not had any orders placed successfully since 2/10/2022.  

[Arcinspirations]

@Ava  I understand I can make a draft order but I don’t necessarily  want to do that since this happened to three customers I feel something is wrong at checkout. 

[Ava]

I can understand that for sure, the checkout and shipping rates should work as it's supposed to so you should not need to create a draft order. That was just a workaround for this specific order, as I can't seem to find any technical issues so far. It sounds like you have your rates set up correctly, and since you know who is ordering from you, it sounds like it is not a user error either.

The level of troubleshooting I can do here from the Community Forums is a little limited, as I'm not able to access your account details and deep dive into this! Would you be able to contact our support team via live chat? This way, our support team can authenticate you as the account owner and take a closer look at this order in your admin section. We can also get our technical team to go through the internal logs to find where this error may be so you won't see it again in future.

I'm sure our support team will get to the bottom of this for you, and thank you for your patience while we worked through things here!