Block shipping to certain countries

[bmlvail]

Hello

We are USA based but certain items we cannot sell/ship in the USA but we can elsewhere. We wish these items to be seen on our site worldwide but if anyone tries to purchase and ship to a USA address it is blocked. Possible?

[clownguts]

Hi Bmlvail,

One way of doing that would be to set the weight of that product to be very large amount. Then, make sure that weights that large don't have any rates in your USA zones. You would need to create new rates to target those weights though for the orders that you do want to ship to. One of the main drawbacks to this method is that if you someone orders the product and other products outside the USA it's going to be hard to get the shipping rates to work out properly. Of course, if you sell more than these two kinds of products this method probably won't work for you.

In that case, your best bet is to use the Better Shipping app to create per product shipping rates. Be mindful though, that app also requires your store to be set up with our carrier calculated shipping feature. I believe to add Carrier Calculated Shipping costs around $20 per month

Thanks,

Nathan

[bmlvail]

Really this has nothing to do with shipping rates. Ideally I should be able to highlight a product in the cart with a flag that says "this is not available in the country you have selected" or something along those lines.

There should be an easy way to set any restrictions at the product level not for the whole site. Certainly this is a fairly common issue with licensed or other restricted items. Any other ideas?

[Dallas]

Hey, there.

Dallas here from the Shopify Social Care Team. 

If you don't want to allow customers to purchase and ship to a certain country you would need to make sure that you don't add that country as a shipping option. Under Settings > Shipping in the Store Admin you will be able to set up shipping parameters for all countries (or if the shipping rates are different per country you can set it up per country). In order to not enable the United States you would want to make a Parameter for North America and just not select the United States of America.

First you will have to Add Shipping Zone.

Then you can label it North America and then select 'Add Countries'

In the list of countries scroll down to North America and unselect the United States.

By the sounds of it you want the entire world to see the products, just not buy the products. However, if you are wanting to make sure that no one from the USA purchases from your store or see the items you are even able to block them from being able to visit your store. An app like Easy Blocker http://bit.ly/2Tl1RiN would do the trick for that.

With an app like this it will block all IP addresses located in the desired country from being able to purchase on your store. It might be just what you are looking for.

Is there a particular reason that you don't want the United States to be a part of who you are selling to? If it is related to fraud you may want to look into fraud protection. There are many different tools for fraud prevention, but there are two that I recommend. None of these are guaranteed, however, they do help a lot. Fraud Filter is created by Shopify and then there is Signifyd. Both are worth looking into, so I definitely suggest taking a look!

If you have any more questions in regards to this or anything else please let me know.

In order to create shipping rates per item you would need an app. Intuitive Shipping and Better Shipping are my two personal favorites for this. They will allow you to set up shipping parameters for each product on their own. This way you will allow your customers to see your products, but certain products won't be able to be purchased by certain locations. 

Did this help to answer your question? 

Best,
Dallas

[bmlvail]

I think you do not understand the issue. What I need must be at the product level not for the whole site. Only certain products cannot be sold in the USA due to licensing issues. 

Really this has nothing to do with shipping rates. Ideally I should be able to highlight a product in the cart with a flag that says "this is not available in the country you have selected" or something along those lines. 

There should be an easy way to set any restrictions at the product level not for the whole site. Certainly this is a fairly common issue with licensed or other restricted items. Any other ideas?

[Dallas]

Hi, @bmlvail & @Lloyd_Silverste 

An app like Locksmith will make these products not visible for those countries. This way the customer in the countries you don't want to sell to will definitely not be able to purchase those specific products. 

The other option, if you didn't want to do the shipping settings, would be to code in some javascript to your store as mentioned here. This, however, would require knowledge of javascript. In that case, it might be better to reach out to the Shopify Experts. They would for sure be able to get that written up for you. 

I think these would be the best options for what you are looking for. 

[windy3]

Hello,

I have a similar requirement. Only certain products are banned to be shipped to certain states like NY, NJ, CA. We do not ship all of our products to the United Kingdom. We are currently evaluating Shopify to replace our current custom solution on NopCommerce. It seems that creating the shipping zones and not selecting places where products are shipped for each type of restricted product and applying the products to that shipping profile will satisfy our need. We tried checking out to CA with a product and the message that came up said that we do not ship to the United States. I do wish it would specify the state in our case, but this seems like it will work for us. 

[SharonReeds]

@windy3,

Profiles can work for this, it just requires a lot of manual work in adding your products to the proper profiles. We have two tools that can help you with this, it just depends on how much time you are wanting to spend.

Intuitive Shipping lets you create Conditions (rules) for these products, or you can simply click a box "does not ship to" for Specific states. This will cut down significantly on your time. We have a lot of merchants using us for restricted products since they simply don't have the time to manage a complicated setup with profiles. You can also add custom descriptions at checkout letting customers know how long the order will take to ship, that items in the order may arrive separately (great if you use multiple warehouses), or anything else you may want to put as a custom description at checkout. You can book a call with our team if you would like to learn more about the app. 

Automate Shipping Profiles will automatically assign your products to the appropriate profiles (you have to create Conditions, first for this so the system knows where to put the products). With Automate Shipping Profiles, you will save 15 seconds/product and every product you add to your catalog will be automatically assigned to the proper shipping profile, too! 

Let me know if you have any questions - I love to talk ship 🙂 

Warm regards,
Sharon 

[val_wheat]

I think there's an easier way to go about it. 
Just go to settings -> Shipping -> Manage rates (under General shipping rate). Then Create a shipping zone -> Add India. And Save! That's it. Just don't add any rates to India and customers from India won't be able to complete the purchase of the product. 

[Dallas]

Yes, that is also a great option and a great free alternative. 

The only thing to note with that is that you might have customers land on your store, fall for your products, want to purchase and then find out when they're ready to buy that they can't continue with the checkout. Although this answers the question of blocking certain countries this could potentially lead to some negative store reviews. 

[landed]

Agree with many that this should be in the core of shopify. Relying on 3rd party plugins is not a great way to go.

[Debdutto]

I have some products are restricted to Kolkata,India Only. 

Rest products are for whole India.

How to manage it ? Is there any way to restrict specific products? 

Eg- When the customer wants to order he can put his pincode and check.

[Dallas]

There certainly are ways to do this. I actually wrote out a forum post last week that goes into all of the specifics of what would be needed for what you're looking to do. 

If you click this link here you will be brought to the reply where I list all of the options. Are you able to read over those to see if that's what you're looking for or if any of those would work. If you have any follow up questions please don't hesitate to let me know! 

[SLEVB]

GREAT Free solution. some of the other APP solutions were a ridiculous month fee. 

One additional suggestion to make also is to customise the Error shipping text the user will get. This can all be done from the Shopify Admin  THEMES--> EDIT LANGUAGES and give some generic text says something like "you can not ship to this location"

[BrandiBrandi]

Hi.  

I think using the app called Geoip Product Blocker might solve your issue here.  you can block individual products or whole collections.  You can block specific countries from seeing specific products or collections.  Be careful though, if you are blocking all the products within one of your pages then the viewers can still see the page, it will just be blank (which in my opinion looks very unprofessional).  Hope this helps 

[Lloyd_Silverste]

We have a distributor in Australia that sells our products, and want to restrict orders from Australia and New Zealand. We are using geolizr to add a pop up when it recognizes a URL from those countries, but the customer can still continue to our site to order.  If we remove these countries from our international shipping zone, the customer will go through the entire shopping process only to discover in the shopping cart that there are no shipping option. Is there a way to have provide a message that gives them a message, maybe with a link to the Australia distributor, when they are checking out?

[ForeverSmol]

I'm currently experiencing the same issue as the OP - I have specific products that can not ship to certain countries. I need to be able to select a product and set a condition that it's unable to ship to a specific location or advise the customer of this condition prior to them adding to cart. 

I'm surprised this isn't a core feature Shopify... 

Working with multiple suppliers that all have their own ship policies, per product, means Shopify's current solution of setting up ship zones will be a ton of manual work. 

If I'm understanding correctly, I'll have to set up a ship profile per product, per country.

I've seen some third party apps recommended that I will check out - just very surprised Shopify doesn't offer that level of control for its user base. 

[inshase33]

I've a similar however opposite trouble. As my enterprise is primarily based in Southern Ireland I can ship at the same fee to Northern Ireland but it's far a long way more expensive to deliver to Scotland and other country details you can see here, Wales and England and there may be no way to separate these.