A customer entered the wrong shipping address, and the order got lost in the mail. What to do?

This question tends to repeat itself among many merchants because this kind of problem is part of being a Shopify merchant. First, you have to decide with yourself what kind of business you want to be. Are you targetting customers for a one-off purchase, or are you building a brand where you want loyal customers that keep returning? If customers buy from you once and never again, then you may have a short term approach, blaming the customer for his/her mistake and treating them accordingly (don’t refund or charge for a new order). But, if you want to build a brand that customers like, keep returning to and even refer their friends to, then you should have a long term approach. The long term approach doesn’t calculate profit and loss based on a single transaction. It does so based on Lifetime Value. This means the total amount an average customer spends in your store during the entire time they spend with you. Your average LTV may not be high right now, but it can easily be improved with email/SMS marketing, retargeting ads, boosted posts, and excellent customer service, of course. There are many posts about how to calculate LTV for eCommerce customers. If you take this approach, then you have to understand that the customer is always right. And they are right because you could have prevented their mistake in the first place. So, the first thing you should do is resend the order at your expense. Don’t worry, if you make a customer happy the money is going to return to you many times over. Politely make sure that the customer understands that you went above and beyond for them, don’t be pushy but also don’t let them take it for granted. Always take care of your customers. This loss now could be one of your best customers moving forward because you took care of them. If you play your cards right, you may even get a 5-star review and a few referrals. Lemons into lemonade... Then, you should improve your checkout flow to mitigate the number of times this kind of incident repeats itself. There are tools and techniques to catch address errors quickly and have the customer fix them as soon as possible, and before the order is shipped: • If you had many customers entering incorrect addresses, try to find a pattern so you’d know what to fix. • Verify that the address is valid. • Once the order is placed, send a verification email/text to make sure all the details are correct. Finally, claim the order that was resent as a business expense or file a claim with the post office. And open a corporate account with your carrier so that you have insurance on future deliveries. Then, if a parcel gets lost in the mail, you claim it against the insurance and the carrier takes it off your invoice.