What Is the Difference Between Shipping Address and Billing Address?

When shopping online or printing shipping labels yourself, you may be required to enter your billing address and shipping address. The two are sometimes one and the same, but that’s not always the case. If you want your package to arrive safely and on time, you need to understand the difference between billing address and shipping address in order to avoid errors.

To put it simply, the shipping address is where you want your parcel delivered, and the billing address is the address linked to the specific form of payment you’re using to pay for your order or shipping label. The two can be the same when your billing address is your home address and you want the parcel delivered to your home address as well. However, it is very much not so in situations where a person’s home address isn’t the one linked to their bank card or when the delivery location is different from their billing location.

So, let’s take a closer look at the two addresses and all the differences between them to avoid mix-ups. As we’ve already stated, the shipping address is the destination address of your parcel. For example, when your order a product online, you might want to have it shipped to your home, office, PO Box, delivery address of a logistics company, or even a friend’s address if the purchase is intended as a gift.

In addition to letting the postal company know where your package needs to be delivered, the shipping address is necessary to calculate the shipping rate (unless you’ve opted for a flat rate shipping service) and estimated delivery time. If you fail to enter the correct delivery address, your package may be delayed, delivered to the wrong address, or returned to the sender. Sometimes it is possible to change the erroneous delivery address, but it may cost you money.

The billing address is connected to the location where you receive correspondence from the bank. For most people, the billing address is the same as their residential address. You are required to enter your billing address when making a purchase online or printing a shipping label in order to authenticate your payment.

Merchants use the address verification service provided by major credit card processors in order to verify that a credit or debit card used by a customer indeed belongs to them. If you fail to enter the correct billing address, your payment won’t be processed.

To avoid confusion, you should know that the two addresses are usually entered at different points. You need to enter your shipping address when selecting a delivery location at checkout when purchasing a product from an online store, or when filling in the shipping label form when generating a shipping label online, whereas the billing address is entered when selecting a payment option.

With PostageMaker, you won’t have to enter your billing address when printing shipping labels. Here’s how our system works: before generating a shipping label, you need to add funds to your personal account. This is where you might be required to enter your billing address if you’re funding your account via a credit or debit card.

When you’re generating a shipping label, its cost is paid from your account in the PostageMaker system, so there is no need to enter your billing address once more. The only addresses you need to enter are the sender’s address and the recipient’s address (shipping address). This system helps to avoid confusion between the two addresses and prevent errors.

At PostageMaker, we use special software to check postal addresses in order to prevent errors in the sender’s and recipient’s addresses (for example, wrong ZIP codes) and ensure that your package arrives where it is supposed to arrive. We also allow you to save multiple shipping addresses in an address book so that you don’t have to enter them manually every time you need to create a shipping label.