Why are addresses with non-Roman characters allowed?

[biglittleape]

Most shipping providers do not support non Roman characters in the shipping address.  Why is eBay allowing buyers to use foreign characters in the address and name?  You can't create a shipping label with these characters.

[richardcm]

Because eBay is an international company with buyers and sellers in many countries. The problem is not eBay, it is the shipping companies.

[widgetc]

I send most items letter mail via Canada Post so the only thing they need is the destination country in Roman Characters. I have read that letter mail to places like China, Japan, etc. are 60% less  likely to go missing when their native writing system is used.

A letter mailed here with only Korean characters is rather akin to one maild from here to Korea in only English.

[ricarmic]

A current pet peeve of mine is that whent I go to fill in the Canada Post customs form for someone in Hong Kong for example, I'm typing in english and the AUTOADRESS brings up the Cantonese (or whatever it is) options.... well I don't know which one it is, I can't ready Canonese, and I know that the autoaddress is barely competent for anything outside North America or western european/commonwealth countries so I end up manually putting in the english version......

[biglittleape]

I know UPS labels will not print non Roman characters, they all turn out as ? characters.

[widgetc]

" Cantonese (or whatever it is) "

Even though the spoken language is very different the symbolic writing is the same for Cantonese, Mandarin. Shanghiese, etc

[femmefan1946]

Fun Fact: English only became an official language of the Universal Postal Union in 1994. The UPU Treaty was signed in 1874.

[marnotom!]

C’est vrai!

[ypdc_dennis]

https://help.shipstation.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026138211-Labels-Using-Non-Roman-Characters

[zee-chan]

Copy and paste that address into Word or Notepad and print it out, and stick it on the front of the envelope/parcel. Just have the destination country's name in English.

Another fun fact: When I went to travel in Japan, most taxi drivers do NOT know how to read the romantized address and they wouldn't even know how to put it in their navigation device. I have to give them the full address written in Japanese to get to my destination (Japan address system is very confusing for foreigners). This is likely the case with most countries where English is not the primary language. 

[widgetc]

"Copy and paste that address into Word or Notepad and print it out, and stick it on the front of the envelope/parcel. Just have the destination country's name in English."

or copy an image to irfanview and print

[biglittleape]

I'm not mailing out letters here using snail mail, I'm printing official UPS labels on 4x6 thermal printer.  Had to cancel the order and let buyer know, he later edited his eBay address to use Roman and re-ordered.  Still, there should be a better way to handle this.  Not hard to detect these characters in code and have the option where a seller can block any purchase like that.

Simple fact is couriers like UPS/FedEx do not support non Roman characters on shipping labels.

[femmefan1946]

Does the postal code on the thermal label pick up?

That is what is used in most handling.

So putting a readable label next to the garbage one should be useful once the parcel reaches a human being.

[deeeight]

Simple solution for me was to just NOT sell to buyers in those non-roman character countries. So most all of Asia and soviet block countries are in my exclusion list.