Anyone ever encounter this problem?

[inhawaii]

I was preparing to ship out an order last night.

When I went to print out the shipping label I get  big bold red error message

telling me that I had to change the shipping address.

At the same time it reminded me that if I change the address

I would lose my seller protection.

It said there could not be more than 40 characters in address line 1.

The customer had 54 characters in address line 1.

I ended up cancelling the order - problem with address.

Then I got into a back and fourth with the customer who is insisting it is a valid address and he's never had any trouble receiving ebay orders before.

I told him to about the 40 character limit and asked hi to correct his address and re-purchase.

He never did. 

My question is this, Why would ebay allow more characters on address line 1  than the maximum amount ?

Anyone else experience this? 

[pjcdn2005]

You could have put part of the address on the second line. That would not be considered as changing the address and you would have still had seller protection.  I've done it with foreign addresses in the past and an ebay rep has confirmed on the boards that it was fine to do that.

I have no idea why ebay doesn't sent it up so that it automatically defaults to the second line when the address is more than 40 characters. 

[ebooksdiva]

I had a similar experience a few days ago. 
A buyer from Australia made a purchase from me. When I went to purchase the label I got the red  over 40 character message.

The buyer added ( Fastway & Sendle won t post to my address) next to their name. I was going to put it in the line underneath, I just took that out since  I wasn't using Fastway or Sendle to ship, I figured eBay shipping hub will get it without that. 

[a_c_green]

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@pjcdn2005 wrote:

You could have put part of the address on the second line. That would [not] be considered as changing the address and you would have still had seller protection. 

---

Fixed it for you. 😉 Yes, correcting the address is not the same as changing the destination.

The line length issue has been a longstanding bug in eBay code (i.e. you can store an address line that's longer than the allowable length on the label), but there has been little to no interest in fixing it, possibly because the code revisions are too difficult to work out using novice or contract programmers. (I notice that they finally fixed the Euro-style format of addresses in the emailed payment notifications, only about three years after that was first reported.)

So just find a logical spot on Line 1 to break the address to a second line. It'll be fine.

[pjcdn2005]

Thanks for reading my mind and making the correction. 😀

[kensgiftshop]

I get that sometimes and I just take some from the first line and put it on the second line.

You're not changing anything and you still have your protection.

[toysaver]

I've had that happen.   I copied and pasted the extra characters into address line 2 and deleted them from line 1.   It's considered a truncated address.  When viewed on the label the whole address is there in all it's glory.  It is not therefore shipping to another address.   The 'spirit' of not shipping to another address means not shipping to another person at another place.   

I'm sure I took into consideration the value of what I sold and checked what I could learn of the buyer's history.   You always have to do what you are comfortable with.  

[a_c_green]

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@pjcdn2005 wrote:

Thanks for reading my mind and making the correction. 😀

---

If you haven't heard of it already, Google the "Wicked Bible" sometime... 😂

[inhawaii]

Thanks everyone!

Move some stuff from line 1 to line 2.

DUH! Why didn't I think of that?  

I'm such a sorry excuse for a "superstar".   LOL

Lost a $90 sale though.

Oh well, hopefully he'll re-purchase.

[nobody*s_perfect]

Another strategy, if this happens again, is to purchase the label elsewhere (Pirateship, PayPal, usps.com) and then paste the tracking number into the eBay transaction.  As long as the ZIP Code is the same, eBay doesn't see it as a changed address.

[auctiondibs]

The same exact thing happened to one of my BIN items. The same pop-up with the shipping name exceeding 40 characters error and warning that I could lose my seller protection if "the changes I make are substantially different from what the buyer intended". This was strike one for the buyer.

The buyer's ship to address was to a reshipper in Miami. That was also the reason why the ship to name was more than 40 characters long. It was the courier's business name, the buyer's full name, and what appears to be their account number for that reshipper. The "Address Line 1" also included the city, state, and zip code, so the shipping label would have showed the city, state, and zip twice, if I was allowed to print it that way. This was strike two for the buyer.

The buyer did have over 100 feedbacks and included a couple of received as a buyer feedbacks from the past month. I guess other sellers were able to ship packages to this buyer. I did contact the buyer twice with a screen capture of the shipping warning pop-up window the first time, and then about the double city, state, and zip, but the buyer never replied. This was strike three for this buyer.

I decided to cancel the sale due to an "issue with the buyer's shipping address". I just didn't want to take a chance of trying to correct the buyer's ship to name and address to a reshipper, and have it get lost between the reshipper and buyer.

I understand that I'm off the hook once the package is "delivered" to the reshipper's address. I've shipped multiple orders to reshippers all over the USA already with no issues. My gut told me to just cancel the order and refund the buyer.

@inhawaii So you are not the only seller that came across this 40 character issue. Your issue was with "Address Line 1" and my issue was with the "Name" field plus the double city, state and zip info. I could have corrected this myself, but it really should be on the buyer to correct this.

Problem with shipping info + shipping to a Reshipper + not replying to my messages = STRIKING OUT THE SIDE. Inning over.

[slippinjimmy]

In what world is splitting an address over two lines "substantially different"?

Answer: There is no world!

I'm not sure why eBay limits addresses to 40 characters, the limit for USPS is 46 for address line 1 or 2.

On the other hand UPS is 30 and FedEx is 35......

https://www.serviceobjects.com/blog/character-limits-in-address-lines-for-usps-ups-and-fedex/

[onlinecentral]

On dozens of occasions, I have moved some excess portion of line 1 into line 2. Moved the city, state and zip from a line into the correct input fields. I never heard from the buyers and eBay let me keep the payments.

[vintage-camerastuff]

I used to get those all the time when shipping international orders.  I would just fix it myself.  Never had a problem.  No reason to cancel an order for that.

[dhbookds]

DUH! Why didn't I think of that?

Ebay may not have faith buyers could think of that.....