The Problem: Shipping Address Verification Became a Bottleneck
At a trading company, one of the most repetitive and tedious tasks was manually checking shipping addresses in Google Sheets, line by line.
The Issues: Addresses came in irregular formats with missing information and frequent typos. Some regions couldn't receive shipments, yet orders kept arriving anyway.
Processing 300 orders per week meant one person had to spend 2 hours on address verification alone.
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The Solution: Building an "Address Validation Bot" with Claude Code
Step 1: Map Out Your Google Sheet Structure
First, organize your sheet with these columns.
Order ID | Customer Name | Address Line 1 | Address Line 2 | City | Postal Code | Country
Step 2: Write Validation Rules in Claude Code
Input the following verification rules into your Claude Code script.
• Required field check (address, city, postal code all filled)
• Address length validation (too short signals incomplete data)
• Restricted region filtering (compare against your no-ship list)
• Postal code format validation (correct format for each country)
• Common typo detection (build a database of 200+ frequent errors)
Step 3: Auto-Classify and Alert
The bot sorts each order into 3 categories.
1. **"Clear"** - Safe to ship
2. **"Warning"** - Needs manual review
3. **"Critical"** - Contact customer immediately
Add new column "Address Status" in Google Sheet
Clear | Warning | Critical
Step 4: Shift Your Workflow
Before: Team member manually eyeballs each order and takes notes in Excel
Now: Bot runs automatically every morning at 9 AM. Results populate the sheet instantly. Team focuses only on the 10~15 "Warning" and "Critical" flags.
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Results: From 2 Hours to 3 Minutes
Time Saved
• Before: 30 seconds per order (300 × 30 sec = 150 minutes)
• After: 3-minute bot run + 10-minute manual review = 137 minutes saved weekly
Error Reduction
• Missed errors dropped from 5~7 per week to zero
• Customer returns and shipping delays fell by 40%
Team's New Focus
• Eliminated manual data entry
• Shifted to proactive customer outreach for flagged addresses
• Only update rules when new regions or formats appear
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Why Non-Developers Can Actually Do This
1. **Claude Code Understands Plain English**: Just tell it "find postal codes we can't ship to"
2. **Testing is Quick**: Run on 5 sample orders, adjust, repeat
3. **Incremental Refinement**: "I found a new error pattern, add this rule" → next run applies it
4. **Clear Logs**: The bot shows you exactly what failed and why, no debugging skills needed
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Final Thought
"Automation isn't just for big projects." Every team has that 2-hour weekly task, repetitive but important, too tedious to do by hand. That's where Claude Code shines.
Start with next week's order batch.