The State/Province and Country Validator module provides fine-grained control over usage of the "State" dropdown boxes and "Other/state province" fields. This module can help you avoid expensive international shipping problems that arise from customer errors in filling out the shipping and billing addresses.

The basic MIVA installation does not check to make sure that the "State" dropdown box is only used for the United States, nor that the "Other state/province" field is used only for international orders. With this module, you can select on a per-country basis whether or not customers are allowed to leave the state field blank, use the "State" dropdown, or manually type into the "Other state/province" field.

A common case that we have experienced at Vision Audio because of MIVA's default behavior is that customers would sometimes type their country name into the "Other state/province" field and completely miss the actual "Country" dropdown, leaving it as United States. MIVA would accept this input, but because we charged shipping based on world zone, we would lose money, as the shipping module would still charge the customer domestic shipping rates. This module, along with our Advanced Postal Code Validator module, has put a stop to this problem entirely.