I had an odd issue with UPS shipment methods the other day. A customer complained that their Canadian address was not returning UPS shipment pricing. It’s important to note that on this particular (old) website, Canadian addresses are hand typed by the user into standard text inputs. Oops!

Don’t let users have the opportunity to enter garbage data. If you do, they will. It’s just one of those laws of the universe. Thermodynamics?

Here’s the error:

UPS: 111286: {Provided State} is not a valid state for the specified shipment.

The state the user provided was:

On

Why didn’t that work? The state codes are case sensitive, and must be exact. Changing the customer’s address to use the following solved the problem:

ON

Note: I’ve seen other people with this problem on the web. They complained about values like “Ontario” not being valid. Don’t let the user provide bad inputs, give them a select list of valid state codes.