Ask HN: What is common practice for Shipping and Billing addresses?

What is common practice for e-commerce websites, concerning a difference in Shipping and Billing addresses? Pretty straight forward question.<p>Is there any laws to consider?<p>To make a long back story relatively short, I had placed an order wirth an online retailer for some collectables. I noticed about a week after having received the confirmation e-mail, I recieved another e-mail notifying me that there was an issue with the order. I login and see that the order status has been changed from "processing" to "contact us," so I e-mail and ask about the status change. They e-mailed me asking to provide full first and last name for the shipping address (I typically only use initials for the name field or give no name at all, out of privacy concerns) and confirm that it is the same address as the billing address. Further the e-mail stated that the company needed to know the reason for the differing addresses. Then, not 3 hours later, another e-mailed arrived from the company stating that the order had been canceled, because they could not contact me via phone or e-mail.<p>I have ordered countless items from other online retailers in similar fashion and never encountered this problem (btw, my billing address is almost always different from shipping address, because I use my parents address as my permanent address (i e billing address), while I am away at school ~9 months out of the year). I am just generally bewildered by the whole ordeal and I am frankly unsure what the normal procedure for online retailers is.<p>Please leave a comment if you can offer any insight into this.<p>Thank you,