A merchant in Australia needs to restrict shipping for certain products to exclude remote areas within states, while still serving metropolitan regions like capital cities.
Core limitation:
Shopify’s native shipping zones only support state-level or country-level restrictions, not granular postcode-based rules.
Recommended solutions:
Create a separate shipping profile for affected products (Settings → Shipping and delivery → Shipping profiles).
Use a third-party app that supports postcode-based shipping rules, such as:
Better Shipping
Advanced Shipping Rules
Bespoke Shipping
ShipperHQ
PluginHive’s Multi-Carrier Shipping Label
How it works:
These apps allow merchants to define shipping rates or restrictions by postcode. For remote postcodes, merchants can either block them entirely (no rate shown = order can’t complete) or set prohibitively high rates.
Alternative for Shopify Plus:
Checkout scripts can block specific postcode ranges, but this isn’t available on standard plans.
Without an app, manual order monitoring and refunds would be required—an inefficient workaround.
Summarized with AI on October 23.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
Hi, I live in Australia, and need to work out how to restrict shipping for specific products to exclude specific areas within States. When I edit Shipping Zones for Australia, I only get whole states I can restrict by (eg Victoria, Western Australia). However, I need to be able to restrict shipping for specific products to a more granular level. (eg I want to allow shipping to say the capital city in Western Australia, but not to the Remote areas in that state). Any ideas folks?
Australia is a mix of highly populated areas which are quite manageable to ship to, and many very remote areas that are extremely expensive and difficult to ship to.
Hey Jamie
Yeah, this one’s a bit tricky since Shopify’s default zones only go by state or country; not regional postcodes.
The workaround I usually use for stores in AU is setting up custom shipping profiles for those specific products, then applying postcode-based rules through a third-party rate app (like Better Shipping or Advanced Shipping Rules). That way you can still allow metro areas while blocking or setting higher rates for remote ones.
If you’d like, I can show you the exact setup I’ve used before for Aussie stores, it keeps costs down and avoids customers from those unserviceable zones sneaking through checkout.
Yeah, Shopify’s default shipping setup can be a bit limiting, it only lets you restrict by whole states, so shipping to a capital city while skipping remote areas can be tricky.
A good way to handle this is with PluginHive’s Multi-Carrier Shipping Label App, which lets you set up shipping zones not just by country or state, but also by postal codes. This way, you can include only the areas you want to ship to and exclude expensive or hard-to-reach regions, giving you much more precise control.
On top of that, it also helps display live rates, automatically print labels, and send customers real-time tracking updates, all in one place.
Shopify’s native shipping zones only let you include or exclude entire states or countries, so there isn’t a way to blacklist specific postcodes without using a workaround. To get more granular you can do two things:
Create a separate shipping profile for the affected products: Go to Settings → Shipping and delivery → Shipping profiles, and move the product(s) that have high shipping costs into their own profile. This isolates them from your default rates.
Use a postcode‑based rate app: Apps like Better Shipping, Advanced Shipping Rules, Bespoke Shipping or ShipperHQ allow you to define rates or restrictions by postcode/zip code. Within the custom profile you just created, configure the app to offer rates only for the metro postcodes you want (e.g. Perth CBD/Suburbs) and either leave the remote postcodes blank (to block them) or assign very high rates.
These apps work because they handle the postcode logic that Shopify doesn’t support. When a customer enters a restricted postcode at checkout, no shipping rate will be returned, so they can’t complete the order. If you’re on Shopify Plus you could also write a checkout script to cancel or block addresses in certain postcode ranges, but for non‑Plus stores a shipping rate app is the easiest solution.
Without an app there’s no automated way to exclude remote areas, so you’d have to monitor orders manually and refund ones from disallowed postcodes.
Shopify only lets you block shipping at the state level within Australia, so yeah you won’t be able to do “WA metro OK, remote WA no-go” using the default shipping zones. Super annoying for AU merchants since shipping to Broome ≠shipping to Perth.
To do metro vs remote rules, you’ll need a shipping rules app that supports postcode logic. Those let you do things like:
WA metro postcodes = allow
WA remote postcodes = block or charge higher rate
Some stores also handle this by tagging products + Shopify Flow → send to a special shipping profile, but for AU postcode filtering an app is usually easiest.
Hope this helps a bit! If it does, feel free to mark it as a solution so others can find it too
