Changing a Delivery Address After a Label Is Bought

A label cannot be redirected once it is purchased. This is true for every carrier atoship ships with, and it is true whether the label is still sitting in your dashboard or the package is already moving.

A shipping label is not a form you filled in — it is the contract the carrier is working to, and the barcode on it already encodes the destination. Carriers treat that as fixed from the moment the label exists.

What to do, depending on where the package is

The label is bought but not yet handed to the carrier

Void it and buy a new one with the correct address. Nothing is lost: a voided label is refunded in full.

See Voiding and Refunding Labels for the time limits — they vary by carrier, and a label that has already been scanned can no longer be voided.

The package is in transit

The label cannot be changed, but the package can still end up in the right place:

Ask the recipient to refuse it at the door. The carrier returns it to the ship-from address on the label, and you ship it again to the correct address. You pay for the second label; the return leg is usually free.
Ask them to forward it. If the recipient is willing, forwarding from where the package already is often costs less than returning it across the country and shipping again.

Whichever you choose, decide early. The further a package travels, the more a return costs.

The package has been delivered

Nothing can be done through the carrier at that point. Recovery is between you and whoever received it.

Why atoship cannot request a redirect for you

Some carriers offer a paid redirect service to the party that owns the shipping account. On most atoship labels that party is not atoship — it is the carrier network the label was bought through — so there is no account for us to request it from. Rather than have the answer depend on which network happened to price your shipment, the answer is the same for every label: once it is bought, the destination is fixed.

International shipments that cannot be delivered are abandoned, not returned

This one is worth knowing before you ship, not after.

When an international package cannot be delivered — wrong address, refused, unclaimed, or held at customs — atoship instructs the carrier to abandon it at the destination. The goods are disposed of. They do not come back.

That is a deliberate choice. Returning a parcel internationally usually costs more than the goods inside it, once return freight and re-import duties are counted, and that cost lands after the fact with no way to price it up front.

So for international orders in particular:

Validate the address before you buy the label.
Make sure the recipient's phone number and email are on the shipment. Most failed international deliveries are a failed contact attempt, not a wrong street.
Check that the contents and declared value on the customs form are accurate. Customs holds are a common cause of abandonment.

If your business needs undeliverable international parcels returned instead of abandoned, contact support — it can be set per account.

Preventing the problem

Address validation runs on every label at purchase time. Do not skip the warnings; a "corrected" address that changes the street or the ZIP is telling you something.
Confirm changed addresses before you buy. An address edit that arrives after the label is bought cannot be applied to it.
Ship-from matters too. The address on the label is where a refused package goes back to. Keep it current under Settings.

Voiding and Refunding Labels
Address Validation and Correction
International Shipping Guide