Too Much Data Quality

When I do presentations about data quality (or rather the lack thereof), I keep telling the same story about those companies and their e-commerce websites, where a potential customer is supposed to enter the shipping or billing address. In countless cases, the customer is not able to enter the correct address, because North American companies (in many cases the developer of the e-commerce software) have not heard of addressing standards outside of the 50 states and a handful of Canadian provinces. In many parts of the world, people don't care about middle initials, so why is there a special field? I have even two middle initials. Which one am I supposed to use? Even worse, the thing with states. The German Bundesland is never part of the address, and it's definitely not abbreviated with two characters. Although BW is often short for Baden-Württemberg, the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen is always NRW. Fit this in two spaces! Anyway, the real crazy things happen when programmers try to be smart and match cities with states and zip codes. That's when I get annoyed because the system keeps telling me that the entered combination of city, state and zip is invalid, although it is 100% correct. I know where I live and I know my address. But the application apparently knows better.

I always thought that this is an issue particularly in the US. Not so. Just a few minutes ago I tried to order something from Deutsche Telekom, and they should sure know my address (hey, they send me a bill every month) and its correct spelling. When I attempted to close the transaction after filling the shopping cart, the app asked for the shipping address. Ideally I would have thought they default it to the billing address. Nooo. I have to fill out all address fields again. So I do and press Enter. The system reports an error claiming that my zip code and city is wrong? What the §&*#}%$ ??? It's identical with the billing address, absolutely correct, but some loony programmer messes things up. I wonder what they were "testing" in the address. Too much data quality. I ordered nothing, because I couldn't. Ugh.