Nothing bad happens to the order. If the service Tacey uses to check an address is slow, down or gives an answer Tacey cannot read, the order goes through exactly as normal. Tacey simply marks it Not checked. An address check can never cost you a sale.
The rule Tacey follows
Tacey is built on one simple rule: if the check is unavailable, the order still goes through.
A tool that blocked or delayed your orders every time a third-party service had a bad minute would be worse than no tool at all. So Tacey never waits on a check to let an order proceed, and never treats a missing answer as a bad address.
What you see
The order appears on your Orders page as normal, with Not checked in the Address check column.
On the Analytics page, it is counted under Address service did not answer in What happened to each address, separately from addresses that were checked and found wrong.
The order does not get a `tacey-validated` or `tacey-check-address` tag in Shopify, because nothing was checked.
The Analytics page describes it this way: "Tacey let these orders through without checking them, so a slow or unavailable address service can never hold up a sale."
What your customer sees
Nothing unusual. Tacey does not show your customer a warning, an error or an "address could not be checked" message because of an outage. Their Thank you and Order status pages look normal, and they can still use every self-service tool you have switched on.
When a customer edits their address during an outage
If a customer changes their address with the Edit delivery address tool while the check is unavailable, the change still saves, as the customer typed it. Tacey does not hold up a customer who is trying to fix their own address because a service is slow.
Who fixes it
You do not need to do anything. A check that fails because a service did not answer is Tacey's problem, not yours, and the Tacey team is alerted when it happens.
What this does NOT do
It does not block, hold, delay or cancel the order.
It does not mark an unchecked address as Verified. "We could not check" is never shown as "we checked and it is fine".
It does not charge you anything extra, and it does not retry in a way that delays the order.
It does not go back and show the customer a warning later for an order that was not checked.
Frequently asked
Does "Not checked" mean something is wrong with my store?
No. "Not checked" has a few causes: the country is switched off in your settings, your plan's orders for the period are used up, or the service did not answer at that moment. None of them are a fault on your store, and none of them affect the order.
Will the address be checked later?
A new check runs whenever the address changes, for example when the customer edits it with Tacey or your team updates it in Shopify. If the address looks wrong to you in the meantime, you can contact the customer as you normally would.
Is this the same as switching a country off?
The result looks the same on the Orders page (Not checked), but Analytics shows them separately: Outside your checked regions is your choice, and Address service did not answer is a temporary gap.
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