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Dear German Website Owner (yeah, this works both ways) I do have a state in my postal address, and if I have to enter my address as 47374 Richmond instead of
by Vivtek 17y ago
Dear German Website Owner
(yeah, this works both ways)
I do have a state in my postal address, and if I have to enter my address as 47374 Richmond instead of Richmond IN 47374, it will probably go to Virginia first, and maybe they'll get it to me eventually.
Just saying. Internationalism is hard. If you want to go for the global market, it would behoove you to try to do it right.
- jwr 17y agoAbsolutely — which is I would recommend providing multi-line edit boxes for addresses. That way you can enter your address any way you see fit. You really know best how to address mail so that it gets to you, why would I want to pretend I know better?
- josefresco 17y agoYeah giving an end-user a free-form open box to enter their address as they see fit is a GREAT idea. Let me know how that works out for you.
- vanschelven 17y agoIt works very well for me. Provided the goal of the address field is to copy/paste it verbatim to an envelope - if you want to actually understand the different parts of the address this might be counterproductive.
- cookiecaper 17y agoA lot of people use fields such as state and zip code for demographic data collection. A free form textbox makes that more difficult.
- ubernostrum 17y agoSo you have a strong AI doing natural-language parsing to figure out from that freeform address whether you need to charge sales tax/VAT? If you're doing business across state/province or national borders, getting that structured address data (and getting it right) can be awfully important.
- pavel_lishin 17y agoSeems like the easiest solution would be for web developers to show the address in their country's format, if their customer is from their country, and to show a textarea box for anyone else.
- brown9-2 17y agoDoesn't the author address this pretty directly? you should remove the State field if the country isn't set to U.S.A. or at least make it optional He doesn't say "Remove state completely".
- Vivtek 17y agoI guess I should be more specific. This is an actual problem I've had on actual German sites.
- arvinjoar 17y agoWhat exactly were you buying from Germany that you couldn't find in the USA? Oh... I see...
- Vivtek 17y agoBooks in German. Also contact information as a freelancer for translation agencies, who really should know better (but their Web designers often don't). But your joke was very funny.