Needs to be alpha numeric. Most european zip codes are numbers and letters. Australia has 4 numbers.
Ireland does not have a national postal code system. Dublin uses one number an one letter. I think I had to mail an order to Ireland with no zipcode.
Hard to validate. I would think the best you can do is validate for a US address (5 digit/ 8 digit alpha) and allow anything or nothing for a non US address.
Bob

I guess the trick then is to prevent orders from going through that do not have a valid shipping method.

You would rather not take the order from the customer and handle it via phone call and lose the potential customer because they get frustrated by not being able to complete their order?

Thats what I like about BV they allow and order to be placed even if there is a problem and we just handle it on the backend. Even if it takes us a little bit extra time to handle that particular customer we still got the sale.

I even think Marcus mentioned that as a benefit way back when too when discussions like this were raised with BV2004.

Justin -- thank you, and I appreciate what you are saying. One of the issues here is with debit cards -- if it is "declined" it still shows up on the customer's online statement and the funds are held back by the bank for a number of days -- so if the store allows it to go through, the customer assumes it was okay and then you have an argument on your hands because they say "my online statement says you charged me." I can't tell you the number of times I've been contacted saying I charged them twice -- only the first one was a decline because they didn't enter the correct billing address.

So, yes, I can see letting any order go through, but the customer needs to be flagged that the order is "UNPAID -- PLEASE CONTACT THE STORE TO ARRANGE FOR PAYMENT" -- or similar.

I include some free postal code database support with my shipping rate providers. The article, "Postal Code Validator for BVC5" describes one way to use the data to validate US postal codes.

So by default if the Customers Credit Card is declined. The Order still is processed? Is that any inication to the customer during checkout that the card failed?

Other than it being markd as unpaid, how do we as a merchant know it it is unpaid. Do the e-mails reflect if the CC was declined? Also does the e-mail to the customer indicate that the CC was declined or that the order is unpaid?

Thanks

Dan -- under Options you can set it to reject and not let orders go through. That's what I do -- when you start getting a higher volume of orders, it simply is too much work to have to contact customers to get their cc numbers -- most of the time the don't respond to you at all anyway.

SP3 will have zip code validation based on regular expressions. It will be out in a few weeks.