Address autocomplete problem

The address autocomplete feature on the cart page Shipping Calculator is a great feature, however one of our clients has found a major issue with the postcode/suburb database that could prevent some users from completing the shipping calculator and proceeding to checkout.

When searching for “Hobart”, none of the suggested postcode options returned by the autocomplete are valid postcodes for shipping. The valid postcode for Hobart, 7000, doesn’t get returned at all, therefore this is completely broken for customers from Hobart.

This can cause major issues and may cause loss of sales by preventing some users from proceeding to the checkout if they don’t realise they can manually fill out the state, suburb and postcode fields.

I can see you’re using the geonames.org API. I’ve found the 7000 Hobart postcode on their website (https://www.geonames.org/postalcode-search.html?q=7000&country=AU), so I’m not sure if this is an issue with their API or just with the API request parameters.

Our clients website is https://www.ninosjava.com.au, however I’ve tested this on your demo site and the result is the same.

In general the autocomplete option is somewhat unreliable and sometimes I need to refresh the page to get it to work. What makes it worse is that there is no animation or spinner to indicate that any request has been made and to expect the autocomplete options to appear. Its very confusing and not user friendly to be unsure whether or not to expect autocomplete results. It shouldn’t be too much to display a spinner while the AJAX request is being made. A bonus feature would be to take into account the selected state when requesting the auto complete options.

Our client considers the autocomplete function as essential, however as it stands there’s many issues with your implementation and we may have to look at alternatives.

Could you please let me know if these issues are something your development team could look into rectifying?

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