One address form for every country

Context

Sending a one-of-a-kind object to another country should feel safe and simple. Catawiki’s Integrated Shipping Service, built with our partner Sendcloud, creates the shipping label for the seller automatically. But for more than 10% of shipments, the label failed.

For buyers and sellers that meant delays and a bad first experience with the service. For us, up to 24 hours a week of support from CX and engineering, and a blocker to bring the service to new countries.

What we found

Our data analyst gave me the raw data of every failed label, and together we went through it by hand to find what was really going on. We investigated, tested, failed a couple of times and slowly found the reasons. The biggest one was a single field:

80.7%of failed labels

House number80.7%
Sender address5.7%
Postal code5.7%
Address line 13.9%
City1.8%
Company name1.8%

Why shipping labels failed, by field.

People outside the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany wrote the street and the house number together in “Address line 1” and left the house number empty. Add the related “Sender address” and “Line 1” errors and this one habit explained at least 90% of the cases. Digging further, we found more:

We had two different address forms, one for NL, BE and DE and another, harder one for everybody else.
The format changed between sign-up, settings and checkout, and between web and app.
In the backend, two fields were joined before reaching Sendcloud and went over its character limit.

Old address forms: users outside vs. inside NL, BE and DE — Before: one form for people outside NL, BE and DE (left) and another for people inside (right).

The goal

One address form that works for everyone, everywhere: the same across web, app and every step of the journey, and ready for autocomplete, validation and local formats later on. Our target was to cut 80% of the errors, from about 10% to 2%.

How we got there

A/B test with character limits, to understand the problem better. It showed us the backend issue.
Comprehension test with users in our six most used languages (Dutch, Italian, French, English, German and Spanish). We reordered the fields, rewrote the labels and added help for people without a house number or with extra details.
A/B test with the new form, using real addresses from every supported country.

Control and proposal of the new address form — A, the control, and B, the proposal.

Results

Labels created successfully

91.5%99.7%

Global error rate

8.5%0.3%−96%

Even without a custom form per country, people had no trouble filling it in, and it didn’t affect sign-up or bidding. Our six focus countries all reached 99% or more, with Italy, a key market for the shipping service, making the biggest jump:

Successful labels in our focus countries

Italy82.5%99%+16.5 pts

Spain97.6%99.3%+1.7 pts

Germany98.3%99.7%+1.4 pts

UK98.4%99.4%+1.0 pts

France99.5%99.6%+0.1 pts

Netherlands99.9%99.9%0.0 pts

The most exciting part came from outside Europe. Countries where people almost never received a label could finally ship. That opens a door to markets we couldn’t serve before:

Biggest improvements