Change country selected by default in the checkout process

[redels]

Hi Shopifiers!

I'm looking the way to change country selected by default in the checkout process. Is it possible? How?

[Allan]

Hey, @redels!

Jason here from Shopify Support.

Great question. In most cases, you won't be able to select/edit the country shown in the checkout by default. Shopify uses 4 factors to determine which country shows first in the checkout.

1. If the customer used the login feature, the address associated with the account will get filled in automatically.
2. If the store doesn't need the customer to log in, yet your store is geolocated. The country showed up is based on the customer's IP address. If you're unsure if your store is geolocated, it means your store isn't. This requires either a unique set of code customization or a third-party app to achieve this. 
3. If none of the above apply, the default country showed is the most popular country from your online traffic. You can check the most popular countries by Shopify admin > Analytics > Dashboards. Update the date range to last 90 days at the top left.
   
   At the "Online store sessions by location" card, you can see which country is visiting you the most. Here's an example.
   
   In this case, Canada will be the default country in the checkout.
4. If your store is new, it's in alphabetical order. For instance, Afghanistan or the first available country in shipping destinations that are set by you.

If your store is at point 4, you can edit the default country by editing your available shipping destinations. Remember, it comes out in alphabetical order. This means depending on which shipping zones you have, the country that shows up is most likely going to be the one starts with A, B, or C (or whichever country assorted through the order).

I hope this information helps. However, should you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reply back here and I'd be happy to help out!

All the best,
Jason

[MaximS]

This is actually pretty crappy and may explain why my US customers are not buying anything: most of my site's visitors are from Europe, where I have to add VAT, so a US-based customer going to checkout is suddenly going to see a big tax where there shouldn't be any just because Shopify defaulted the country to Europe.  

Is there a way to just keep the country field blank until the user enters it?  Or at least dynamically update the tax when the user changes the country?  Right now if you change from a European/VAT country to US the tax is still showing up: the checkout doesn't update to reflect that lack of tax.  

[ebroberg]

Hello,

Did you ever find a solution to this?

Thanks.

[r8r]

+1          .

[bigsmooth]

How carappy ...AND LAZY can shopify people ne?

My customer's Designer Clothing store is located in a very exclusive neighbourhood in Toronto Canada and ... no offense to the people of Alabama, but defaulting the location and shipping charges to Alabama USA looks like hickville. 

Almost all of her customers are Ontario, Canada.  Should be based on customer locations not Bot Crawling IP Adrresses.

It simply diminishes their brand.

Guess I should be thankful it doesn't default the country to Afghanistan

My god Shopify try a little harder!!!

[michael-helium]

1. If the customer used the login feature, the address associated with the account will get filled in automatically.

Not the solution you all are looking for, but it may help someone. You can use the Customer Fields app to build a form that collects address information from customers. You can set a default country field or allow the customer to choose. Then when they go to checkout, the address associated with the account will be auto-filled.

[Mensah]

Doesn´t really help with first time customers. Can you just make ALL the fields blank, so that ALL customers (before making their account) have to ACTIVELY choose the information that is relevant and needed for their specifics?

Once there had been autofilled some wrong info into a field it is really easy to miss, because at a glance everything looks filled out and there are no warnings.

I recently had a customer shopping while on vacation and the no-good and stupid auto fill put in Croatia because of the IP-address, and he did not notice, now we have had to spend hours on communications and problemsolving and only end up with a very delayed delivery and the choice of an angry customer who has to pay the shipping twice or having to pay the shipping ourselves and thus loosing out on the profit.

WAKE UP SHOPIFY.., AUTO DOES NOT EQUAL SMART!

[DragonflyBrand]

Yes, this is a really bad malfunction. Just yesterday we have sent 2 packages meant to be for Czech customers to Germany instead. So we paid for shipping + 3PL fulfillment services.
The packages were not delivered, so they are on the way back to the 3PL warehouse. We realize this a few days later and have to start communication with the warehouse and the carrier and the customer. This has already caused a few days delation for the customer.
As soon as the packages arrive at 3PL, they need to restock the items back. The bad thing is that the items go into another incomplete "waiting" order as the original one states as fulfilled. So many times we have to produce new items for the original customer.
As soon as the items are produced and back in stock, the 3PL can fulfill the original orders one more time and send them again. We pay another shipping cost + 3PL fulfillment services and the delivery for the customer is in delation for more than a week or two. This is really crazy.