An order fails with "customer.email_address is invalid" but the creator's email looks correct
Overview
You try to place an order for a creator and it fails with an error like customer.email_address - is invalid, returned by your store. You open the creator's profile, the email there looks perfectly fine, and nothing explains the failure.
The reason is that the email GRIN sends with the order does not come from the creator's profile. It comes from the shipping address attached to the order, and that address carries its own email field. If the address email is present but malformed, for example missing the part after the at sign, GRIN sends it as it is and your store rejects the order.
The profile email is only used as a fallback, when the address has no email at all. A wrong address email always wins over a correct profile email.
What you'll need
- The name of the creator whose order failed.
- Access to edit that creator's contact record.
How to fix it
- Open the creator's profile in your Contacts.
- Go to their addresses and open the one used for this order. On most orders this is the address marked Primary.
- Look at the Email field on the address itself, not the email on the profile. Compare the two. A truncated domain, a missing dot, or a stray space is the usual culprit.
- Correct the address email and save. The steps for editing an address are in updating a creator's shipping address.
- Go back to the Activation and place the order again.
Why the bad address is accepted in the first place
GRIN currently lets a contact address be saved with an incomplete email, and only surfaces the problem at order time as an error passed back from your store. That is why nothing warned you when the address was created or imported, and why the error appears far away from the place that caused it.
This is worth knowing if you import contacts in bulk or if creators enter their own shipping details, since those are the two paths where a malformed address email is most likely to slip in unnoticed.
If the address email is already correct
If you have checked the address email and it is well formed, the failure is something else. The message you see is passed straight through from your store rather than generated by GRIN, so the exact wording is your store's. Note the full error text shown on the order and contact GRIN Support with the creator name and the Activation, and we can trace which address GRIN actually sent.
Related
For the order steps themselves, see fulfilling orders in an Activation.