Anybody else recently block orders from Russia and Belarus?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A US-based merchant shares how to block orders from Russia and Belarus using Shopify’s built-in Markets feature. The process involves navigating to Settings > Markets, editing international markets, and removing specific countries from the allowed list.

Key limitation identified:

  • The native Markets blocking feature only works for physical products with shipping addresses
  • Digital products can still be purchased by customers in blocked countries, as confirmed by Shopify support
  • The “Markets You Don’t Sell To” feature doesn’t prevent checkout for digital-only purchases

Workaround suggested:

  • A third-party app (Ultimate Country Blocker) is recommended as an alternative
  • This app blocks visitors from specified countries at the website level and extends the block through checkout
  • Includes visitor logging to monitor incoming traffic from blocked regions

The discussion remains focused on finding effective solutions for merchants selling both physical and digital products who want to restrict sales to these countries.

Summarized with AI on October 26. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

We are in the US, and sell physical as well as digital products, and we no longer want to offer our products to Russia and Belarus. If you too are not interested in sending items there, it’s pretty simple with Shopify to block those orders.

I don’t imagine packages would be allowed to go into Russia and Belarus, but don’t forget about the digitals if you don’t feel right about doing business there.

Shopify makes it easy to block any country. Under SETTINGS (the cog) you go to Markets. There you’ll see your home country and then the internationals. You can edit it and remove the countries.

Then you can view the banned list:

Banned-Countries-March-2022.jpg
Banned-Countries-March-2022.jpg900×394 24.2 KB

If you test an order, you’ll see that once they get to check-out, continuing after they fill out their name/address page, that a message pops up; “This order can’t be shipped to your location. Contact the store for more information.”

-Scot

2

This doesn’t seem to work for digital products. We had the block in place and someone in Russia successfully purchased a digital product. Shopify technical support confirmed that the “Markets You Don’t Sell To” feature only blocks the customer based on the shipping address, despite the fact that the info block on the Markets page says “Customers in these places can’t check out.”

3

You could try Ultimate Country Blocker. You can block Russia, Belarius and others from visiting your website. The block also carries over to the checkout. There is a visitor log for you to monitor incoming traffic.