Do it once: building a UK address block that passes the format check
Type the address in the order a courier reads it: recipient name, building number and street, locality, town, postcode, country, phone. The same block then works for a saved entry, a one-off order and a claim form.
Put the postcode on its own line in capitals with a single space before the last three characters. Ten of the mismatches we see in community threads come from spacing and capitalisation rather than from a wrong address (Community-reported, not independently verified).
1. Open the address book in the account area. 2. Add a new entry and type the block above. 3. Save it with a label such as Home or Work. 4. Place a small test order to a saved entry before you rely on it for a £200 basket.
Build the block in the address book rather than inside an order form. An address typed into a single order is easy to mistype and impossible to reuse, while the same text saved once reappears on every later order and can be corrected in one place for all of them, which matters the first time a postcode changes.
What to type in each field, including the postcode spacing
Recipient name: the person who will sign, which matters when a courier asks for identification. Building number: the number alone, with the street name in the following field rather than merged with it.
Phone: a number that is reachable on a weekday, written in international form. Parcels with an unreachable number are the ones that end up in a depot queue, and a redelivery costs one to three days in our own record (Recorded, 24 parcels).
1. Enter the recipient name as it appears on identification. 2. Split the number and the street. 3. Add the postcode with one space. 4. Save and re-open the entry to check how it was stored.
Watch the phone field as closely as the postcode. A number that reaches a courier but is never answered sends a parcel towards a depot queue, and a redelivery costs one to three days against the same-day delivery that a reachable number usually produces in our own record (Recorded, 24 parcels).
What the saved record holds and what it deliberately does not
A saved entry holds the delivery text and the phone number. It does not hold the parcel, the order or the line, so changing a saved address does not move a parcel that has already been packed, and that distinction catches people out weekly.
An address can be changed while an order sits in the warehouse, but not once the parcel is packed, which our own exit-cost notes treat as the last reversible state. After that point an address problem becomes a redelivery problem.
Whether saved entries carry across to a different device, or survive an account closure, is Not verified. Treat a saved entry as a convenience rather than as a record, and keep the text somewhere you control.
Whether a saved entry can be edited from the order screen, or only from the address book, is Not verified on our side. Edit in the address book first and then open the order to see what it shows, because two slightly different versions of one address is the failure mode that produces a parcel at the wrong door.
Deleting a saved entry does not change an order that is already moving. Removing an address from the book clears it for future orders, while a parcel already packed keeps the address it was labelled with, and that difference between editing a template and editing a parcel is the one people discover at the wrong moment.
Reading the error messages: four failures and their fixes
An address that will not save usually fails on one of four things: a postcode that does not match the town, a missing house number, a character the field rejects, or a duplicate of an entry already stored.
1. Compare the postcode with the town on a Royal Mail style check. 2. Add a number where the field asks for one. 3. Remove punctuation such as commas and full stops. 4. Rename the label if a duplicate is refused.
A mismatch between postcode and town is the failure worth fixing rather than working around. A parcel addressed to a valid postcode in the wrong town can travel to a depot 60 miles away and come back, which costs a week rather than a day.
These four failures rarely arrive with an explanation attached, so work the list in order rather than guessing. The postcode and town pair is the cause in most of the cases we see described in community threads, and the character rule is the cause in most of the rest (Community-reported, not independently verified).
Keep a plain-text copy of every address outside the account as well. An entry that cannot be exported, or that disappears with a closure request, is worth less than four lines in a phone note, and copying it takes less time than retyping six fields on a phone keyboard.
A postcode and town mismatch is the failure worth fixing rather than working around. A parcel addressed with a valid postcode in the wrong town can travel to a depot 60 miles away and return, which costs a week rather than a day, and the check that prevents it takes under a minute against a map or a previous delivery note.
Keeping two addresses apart when a parcel must go to work
Label saved entries by purpose rather than by street. Work and Home are unmistakable at a glance, while 14 High Street and 14 High Street Flat 2 are not, and the wrong pick is invisible until a parcel arrives at the wrong door.
Check the line, not just the address. Two saved entries can be identical except for the one that carries a weekday delivery instruction, and a work address that closes at 17:00 needs a note to that effect.
Remove an entry you no longer use. A stale address sitting third in the list is a candidate for a mis-click, and deleting one entry takes seconds against a returned parcel and a redelivery window of one to three days.
Re-check a saved entry after any move, office change or new reception desk. An address that was correct in March can point at a building that no longer accepts deliveries in September, and that failure arrives looking like a courier problem rather than an address problem, which is what makes it expensive to diagnose.
The data point behind this note
Address spacing and capitalisation, rather than wrong street text, account for the bulk of the mismatch reports we see in community threads (Community-reported, not independently verified); our own 24 recorded parcels carry no address failure.
Rates last checked 2026-10-02. Where a figure is community-reported we say so; where we could not verify it, we write Not verified instead of estimating.