How to Validate Hundreds of Shipping Addresses Before Your Gift Orders Ship

A corporate buyer sends a 300-row spreadsheet in the first week of December. It was pieced together from a CRM export, a form employees filled in, and last year's list. Some rows have the apartment number in the street line, a few ZIP codes lost their leading zero, and two people still list an office they left in the spring.

Each of those rows becomes a gift that comes back, arrives late, or never arrives. Bad addresses cost more on gift orders than on regular ones, because the recipient didn't place the order and can't fix it. The buyer may not hear about a missing gift until weeks later, and with a holiday deadline, a resend may not arrive in time.

Goode Company ships its pecan pies nationwide, and some single orders reach more than 1,000 recipients. Their in-house tool already validated addresses before they moved to Send To Many. Even so, address validation in Send To Many reduced their resends, read the full Goode Company case study.

Most bad rows come from how the list was built

The buyer rarely types the list themselves. It comes from systems that were built for other jobs, and each one leaves its own kind of error:

• CRM and HR exports often hold billing or office addresses, not where the person wants a gift delivered.

• Forms that recipients fill in produce typos, missing unit numbers, and the city written into the street line.

• Last year's list still has people who moved or changed jobs.

• Excel strips leading zeros from ZIP codes and can turn phone numbers into scientific notation, even after you save to CSV.

The Excel problem is the easiest to prevent. Ask buyers to format ZIP code and phone columns as text before they save the file, as our spreadsheet formatting guide recommends.

Check every address before any order exists

The cheapest place to catch a bad address is before it becomes a Shopify order. Once an order is generated, a fix means editing the order, and once it ships, a fix means a return and a second shipment.

With Send To Many's spreadsheet upload, your team uploads the buyer's file as it arrives and maps its columns, so nobody retypes it into a template. Send To Many then validates every recipient's address. It corrects the common issues it can and flags the ones your team needs to look at.

Validation runs before shipping and tax are calculated for each recipient, so the rates on the buyer's invoice are based on corrected addresses. Nothing is created in Shopify until your team reviews the send and generates the orders.

Send the buyer the flagged rows, not the whole file

Some addresses can't be fixed from the data alone. A missing unit number or a street that doesn't exist in that city needs someone who knows the recipient.

Send the buyer only the rows that need an answer, with what's wrong in each one. A buyer can confirm eight rows over lunch. Asking them to recheck a 300-row file tends to stall the order.

Ask buyers to include an email or phone number column too. Our formatting guide recommends both for follow-up, and they give your team or the carrier a way to reach a recipient when an address is still unclear after delivery starts.

Give big files time before the cutoff

Validation takes longer on large lists. Uploads over 1,000 rows can be slower during the address validation and order calculation steps, so a big December order shouldn't start the afternoon before your shipping cutoff.

Set an internal deadline for large corporate lists a few days ahead of your last ship date. Put that date on your corporate gifting page so buyers know when their list needs to arrive. Our BFCM gifting checklist covers the rest of the season's dates.

Ask returning buyers to refresh last year's list

Your best corporate buyers send on roughly the same schedule every year, often to a list that's mostly the same. A year is long enough for some of those recipients to move or change jobs.

Before the season, ask returning buyers to confirm the list or send an updated export. Send To Many's Send Again feature (in beta) lets a returning gifter start from a previous send, and the addresses still go through validation before orders are created.

Run last year's biggest list through a test upload

Take the largest gifting spreadsheet you processed last season and upload it as a test send. Count how many rows Send To Many corrected and how many it flagged. That number is roughly how many gifts were at risk last year, and it tells you how much time to budget for this year's lists.

For more on getting gift orders into Shopify, see our guides to shipping one order to multiple addresses and importing orders into Shopify.

Send To Many helps you deliver an amazing journey to your gifting customers, whether they're sending to 2 or 2,000 recipients. With address validation and spreadsheet upload handled inside Shopify, your team can spend December packing gifts instead of chasing returns. Check our gifting journey guide for more learnings. Install Send To Many on Shopify.