Qikify helps SOU・SOU ship internationally with clean billing data
Get inspired by how our customer, SOU・SOU, secured shipping-ready billing data with a custom checkout rule.
Customer
SOU・SOU
Platform
Shopify Plus
Website
sousou.co.jp
Industry
Fashion & lifestyle (traditional Japanese textiles, apparel, and home goods)
OVERVIEW
Founded in Kyoto, SOU・SOU is a Japanese textile and fashion brand built on a simple idea: blend traditional materials and techniques with modern, everyday life. Its catalog spans jikatabi (Japan's traditional split-toe footwear), Japanese-style clothing for women, men, and children, coordinating Western casualwear, bags and accessories, tenugui hand towels woven from traditional Ise cotton, and home goods and tableware. Beyond its Kyoto and Tokyo retail locations, SOU・SOU sells through its own online store and ships internationally.
SOU・SOU has used Qikify Checkout Customizer for about a year to control what checkout captures and how. As the brand pushes to grow international sales and make its products more accessible to customers outside Japan, that same attention to checkout has extended into how order data supports fulfillment across borders.
CHALLENGE
Default Shopify checkout accepts any text a customer types into an address or name field, with no way to enforce the format international fulfillment actually needs. For SOU・SOU, that gap showed up in two places:
- Shipping addresses needed a fixed, English-ready format: For international orders, address fields had to be captured in a way carriers could actually use — otherwise labels required manual cleanup before a package could ship.
- Billing names could be entered in non-English scripts, forcing manual translation: Customers ordering from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China could type their billing name in Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, or other non-English characters — names that Shopify's default checkout would accept but that couldn't be used directly on an English-language shipping label. Every order like that meant SOU・SOU's team had to manually translate the billing name before creating a label — extra time on exactly the orders the brand is trying to grow.
SOLUTION
Qikify's team worked through both sides of the problem with SOU・SOU. On shipping, the support team walked them through configuring Checkout Customizer so address fields are captured in a consistent, carrier-ready format for international orders.
On billing, Qikify's product team went further and built SOU・SOU a custom checkout rule, at no extra cost: for orders from Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China, checkout now requires an English-only First and Last billing name — anything left blank or written in Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, or other non-English characters blocks checkout until it's corrected.
RESULTS
- Shipping-side manual cleanup already eliminated: address fields are now captured in a consistent, carrier-ready format — no more cleanup before a package ships.
- Billing-side fix in final rollout: the custom validation rule is in its final build stage; once live, it removes manual translation from the billing side the same way the shipping fix already has.
- A purpose-built solution, not a generic workaround: built specifically around SOU・SOU's own shipping requirements and customer base.
Don't let a standard checkout slow your shipping.
Ship worldwide with accurate billing data.