Before: Days of Finger Pain
Every Monday morning, the sight of sitting in front of the Windows device already made me sigh. I had to manually verify 500 shipping addresses from the previous week's orders one by one.
Find orders with inconsistent address formats → Send confirmation emails to customers → Reflect corrected addresses in the sheet
Repeating this process usually took 3 to 4 hours. Sometimes it took even longer because overseas buyers often made address entry mistakes.
First Attempt: Greedy Rule-Setting
I wrote an automation script with Claude Code. But I was too ambitious.
• Check address length
• Analyze special character patterns
• Detect missing street numbers
• Auto-correct country names
The result was too many false positives. Valid addresses without errors were flagged as suspicious. Team members had to recheck everything manually. Automation created more automation, a vicious cycle.
Second Attempt: Reduce Rules to "3"
I rewrote the Claude Code prompt.
Check only these 3 things:
1. Missing required fields (address line 1, city, postal code)
2. Obvious errors (numbers out of range, forbidden characters)
3. Buyer info and shipping address in completely different countries
This time it worked. Only genuinely suspicious orders were flagged. Humans handled the subtle judgments.
Final Workflow
After: 3-Minute Magic
Every Monday at 10 AM, click the Google Apps Script execute button on the main device.
Stage 1 (30 seconds): Read 500 new order records from last week
Stage 2 (90 seconds): Claude Code filters using 3 rules
Stage 3 (60 seconds): Auto-categorize 15~20 problematic orders into a separate sheet
Result: Team members only verify 15 orders. Correction emails are sent in 2 minutes using auto-generated templates.
Hidden Gains
The real value of automation wasn't just time savings.
• **Pattern Discovery:** Found that "buyers from a specific country consistently enter postal codes incorrectly." Next month, we customized input templates by country.
• **Improved Reliability:** Automation eliminated errors that tired eyes would miss during 3-hour manual reviews.
• **Team Breathing Room:** Mondays now have space to review buyer replies before handling corrections.
Key Lessons
When non-developers automate, perfectionism from day one is a trap. Starting with simple rules and adjusting during actual use is far more efficient. Automation isn't about reaching 100%, but about extracting the heaviest burden from repetitive work.