Address autocomplete in PrestaShop: fewer failed deliveries

«Nobody by that name lives here.» The courier calls, your customer does not pick up because they are at work, and the parcel goes back to the depot. Tomorrow someone on your team will have to call, confirm the street number and pay for a second delivery.

All of it started three days earlier, when somebody typed their address in a hurry on a phone.

What a badly typed address costs

When an order ships with an incomplete address the cost is not one, it is four, and none of them shows up in the shop's statistics:

• The courier attempts delivery, cannot find the place and sends the parcel back.
• Someone of yours calls or emails the customer to confirm the detail.
• A second delivery gets paid for, almost always without charging anyone.
• And the customer experiences it as your mistake, even though they typed it.

In a high-volume shop that is several hours of customer service a month. In a small one, it is the whole margin on that order.

How it looks from the other side

The customer starts typing their street and, after three or four letters, a list of real addresses appears. They tap theirs and the form fills itself in: street, number, postcode, town and region, all at once and with no typos.

It shows most on a phone, which is where people buy the most and type the worst. And the fields are still theirs: if they live in a new building that has not appeared yet, or want to add the floor and door, they type it by hand as always.

This is not about stopping the customer from typing. It is about not making them type what is already known.

And when you are the one taking the order

Some address errors are not made by customers: they are made by whoever takes an order over the phone or fixes an address from the back office, in a hurry and by ear. That is why the autocomplete is in there too, working the same way. Same job, and it catches exactly the errors nobody reviews later.

Four things worth nailing down

Adding the autocomplete is easy. Making it actually pay off comes down to four details that only surface in real use:

1. Keep the browser out of the way. Chrome stores its own addresses and offers them right on top of the good ones; the customer picks the browser's and we are back to square one. It has to lose its turn.
2. Make sure the postcode arrives complete. In some countries it comes back truncated, and half a postcode is a parcel rejected at the courier's depot.
3. Make the region fit. In the shop it is not free text, it is a list, so you have to set the country first and then the right region. Get that wrong and the address is saved lame.
4. Only suggest countries you ship to. Fewer pointless addresses for the customer and fewer lookups to pay for.

What it costs to run

Google's address service is billed by usage: the more searches, the bigger the bill. Two settings keep it close to nothing —limit the countries and make each search count as one rather than as fifteen keystrokes— and it is worth restricting the key to your own domain so nobody else spends it.

With that, on a normal shop the monthly spend is less than a single redelivery. Check the current pricing before doing the maths, because Google has changed it several times.

If you see no suggestions, look here first

The autocomplete attaches to PrestaShop's standard address field. If your shop has a heavily modified checkout and that field goes by another name, it will not appear and it will not throw an error either: it simply will not be there. It is the first thing we look at when somebody tells us they installed it and see nothing.

It is in the catalogue

Address autocomplete, at checkout and in the back office, is Google Address Autocomplete: install it, paste in your Google key and it works from the next order onwards.