What is a DHL Postnummer?
If you ship to Germany and offer delivery to DHL pickup points, your customers need to provide their Postnummer when placing an order. The Postnummer is an individual DHL customer number used to collect parcels from DHL Packstations and pickup points, as well as to track shipments in the DHL mobile app. It must be entered at checkout to ensure the parcel is correctly assigned. Shopify, however, does not come with a dedicated checkout field for entering the Postnummer out of the box. This is why it is necessary to give your customers an option of…
Adding DHL Postnummer at Shopify checkout
The easiest way to let your customers enter their Postnummer during checkout is to use Shopify’s default checkout features — specifically, by editing the placeholder of the already existing optional Address line 2 field so that it informs customers they can enter their Postnummer there.
The first step is to navigate to your Shopify Checkout settings and make sure that in the Customer information section, the Address line 2 field is set as optional:
If it’s already set up this way, go to your Shopify theme settings by selecting Sales channels → Online store → Themes from the sidebar menu. Click the three-dot button next to the theme your store is currently using and choose Edit theme content from the dropdown list:
If it’s already set up this way, go to your Shopify theme settings by selecting Sales channels → Online store → Themes from the sidebar menu. Click the three-dot button … next to the theme your store is currently using and choose Edit default theme content from the dropdown list:
You will be redirected to the Theme content screen, which contains all the text strings used by your store’s theme:
Go to the Checkout & system tab and find the field responsible for the Optional address2 label. To speed things up, you can use the search bar and type Address2 to find it quickly:
Once you’ve found the correct field, replace the default Apartment, suite, etc. (optional) text with your own suggesting that customers can also enter their Postnummer here, for example Apartment, suite or Postnummer for DHL Packstations in Germany :
Confirm the changes you made here with the Save button at the top of the screen.
Once saved, the placeholder for the Address line 2 field in checkout will be updated, clearly guiding your customers to enter their Postnummer for DHL pickup point deliveries in Germany.
The Postnummer entered by customers will be saved as usual in the Address line 2 field in Shopify order details, from where it can also be retrieved and passed on to your shipping integrations, if used.
Adding DHL Postnummer at Shopify checkout on Shopify Plus
If your store runs on Shopify Plus, which allows advanced checkout customization, apart from the method described above, you can also use one of the available apps from the Shopify App Store to add a dedicated field at checkout where customers can enter their DHL Postnummer.