How to restrict shipping countries on certain items/collections?

[Vhanya]

Hello - I'm also trying to see how I can set up my account so that certain products are only available for shipping to specific countries. It's not super clear to me how to do that. Can you help me please?

On another note, does Shopify have a staging environment where we can test settings before pushing them live?

Thanks!

[Trevor]

Hey, @Vhanya!

Happy to help clear up any confusion. Could you tell me what you have set up within Settings/Shipping already? Have you had a chance to review our help documents? I've added them below!

• Convert to Shipping Profiles
• Setting up Zone and Rates
• Shipping Profiles

If you could provide screenshots of what you have set up and further details on the end goal, then we can work together to source a solution. 

[Vhanya]

Thanks for the response.

All I want is to restrict shipping of certain products to a specific
location. The help documents are long and don't seem to directly give me an
answer. Do you mind letting me know how I can do that?

Also, is there a staging environment we can use to test things on before
pushing them live?
thanks
vhanya

[Trevor · Accepted solution]

@Vhanya 

To set up a shipping profile that allows you to restrict certain products to specific locations, you'll need to do the following: 

1. In your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Shipping.
2. In Shipping profiles, click Create new profile.
3. Enter a name for the profile.
4. In the Products section, use the search bar to add products to the shipping profile.
5. Address any changes you need to make to your locations. Refer to Manage your locations for more information.
6. For each shipping zone that you want in your shipping profile, complete the following steps:
   1. In Shipping to, click Create shipping zone.
   2. Name the shipping zone.
   3. Select the countries or regions that are part of the zone, and then click Done.
   4. For each shipping rate you want in the zone, click Add rate, choose the rate's details, and then click Done.
7. Click Save.

We don't currently provide a staging environment; however, you can password protect your store by going to Online Store/Preferences so you can test the rates you've created. 

[Vhanya]

Thank you very much. Very helpful!

[PamelaL]

Peter,

It could be because I’m running on little sleep, but I’m also trying to restrict certain products to certain countries and I’m just a little confused by your instructions.

After I’ve added the product(s) I want to limit shipping to a newly created shipping profile and then adding the shipping zones, am I excluding the countries I do not what those specific products to ship to? Can those rates still be “calculated rates”?

How will the customer see it on their end? I’d like it to be as frustration-free as possible for them.

It would be awesome if the site could automatically “hide” products when someone is viewing the store from a certain country to begin with as well.

[Trevor]

@PamelaL 

After I’ve added the product(s) I want to limit shipping to a newly created shipping profile and then adding the shipping zones, am I excluding the countries I do not what those specific products to ship to? Can those rates still be “calculated rates”?

> That is correct. When creating a shipping profile, you can select which products the profile applies to, which countries the products will ship to, and you're able to add either standard rates or calculated rates. 

How will the customer see it on their end? I’d like it to be as frustration-free as possible for them.

> Your customer will not be aware of the profiles you have set up only that they have x amount of rates to choose from based on the contents of their cart. I'd recommend testing the checkout process through your store to see how this will appear on the customers' end. Though, I can guarantee it has been designed to make it as frustration-free as possible. 

It would be awesome if the site could automatically “hide” products when someone is viewing the store from a certain country to begin with as well.

> Not something we natively provide, but you can use apps like Locksmith to get this setup. 

[Navjeet]

I am not sure if I am the only one who faced this problem with the suggested solution, here is the problem we faced with this suggestion:

In our store we have few items which we would like to sell only in the US and Canada and rest of the item in the store is available to ship world wide, so we followed this suggestion and created a separate shipping profile for the product available only for the US and Canada. 

At first it seems to work so when the user outside of US and Canada tries to by the restricted item they get an error at the checkout which is ok, but now if user in the US and Canada buys an item available world wide and also buys an item which is specific only to their country, they are charge the shipping cost twice! they are charge the shipping cost of both the profile, the general profile (items available world wide + US and Canada) and the profile of items available only for US and Canada.

So this does not really work, another solution which will solve this shopify script : https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/checkout-settings/script-editor/examples/shipping-scripts#hide-ra...

The annoying part is this one you have to enter the country code of all the countries you want to restrict (its a lot if you want to sell only to the US and Canada)

[Jenco8]

I have also just added a whole price point of items that I would like to restrict to certain countries. I’ve figured out a way of sorting by price, making a collection and then tagging those items in order to add them to the more restrictive shipping profile (a bit of a bear of a process!) My first question is whether there is a way to see how the customer views these listings —whether they are only aware of the block when they’ve placed an item into their cart and what happens if they place multiple items in their cart. Is there any way to test this? My ideal solution would be that the restriction would be lifted if they enter enough items in their cart to reach the threshold amount to be eligible for shipping to their country —is this possible?

[AJGILIANA]

By setting up a second profile, the customer could get charged shipping rates twice if they select a product from each profile in their cart. 

Is there a way to prevent double shipping charge?

[Vensy]

I am also having this issue. I sell officially licensed merchandise and each contract has different regions we can ship to. Customers are being double charged for shipping if they purchase from two different zones.

[Laura_SK]

Is it possible to restrict product availability based on shipping address? The shipping profile just hides the products from people in specific countries/areas, but what if they are using VPN or sending a gift to another country? We still want the products to be available for everyone to see, but we just cannot ship them to a specific country.

[Vensy]

Shipping profiles won't hide products from certain countries. You need a separate app for that. Shipping profiles will display shipping options available based on the shipping address (so it solves the VPN issue). Problem is if someone buys products from two different shipping profiles they will get double charged for shipping because Shopify will calculate two separate charging costs per profile. 

[Vensy]

I found an app finally that does this, check out Intuitive Shipping.

https://apps.shopify.com/intuitive-shipping

[Karim_1]

Hello I was trying this method however i have over 1000 product and i want to hide specific products that are more than 100 ml , so maybe i can make collection for it however i am not able to hide them in bulk i need to check each one of them in this method any other thing could help me with that

[TheSaltyLife]

Hi Trevor,

for my European customers, I only want to offer them 2 out of the 10 variants I offer to the US and Canada. How do i isolate the variants?

[MichaelGeo]

Hi there! Here is another solution you might want to consider.

For certain products, you could set the product pages available to visitors from only a list of countries you wish to sell to, but block customers from the rest of the world. In this way, it could help prevent taking orders from unwanted countries.

Here is a tool can help with this: Geo Blocking. You can simply set up rules blocking visitors by countries within a few steps. Then, the tool will generate Javascript code for you to add to your website. You don't need to do any code yourself. Shopify platform is well supported.

Hope it helps!

[Hrag]

Go to "Products," select/check the product to exclude from specific countries, scroll to the bottom of the page where it shows "Bulk edit," "Set as active," "Set as draft," "...", select the "...", a menu will pop up, choose "Exclude from markets", select the countries to exclude, and you're done.

[ELF]

This was amazingly helpful. Thank you!

[TheSaltyLife]

this works for the product itself, but not for specific variants. I'm trying to isolate variants.

[Nilorak]

This only works on a country level not state level though, right?

[miniOrange_inc]

Hello there,

I'm Manish from the miniOrange team.

As I can understand, you are looking to restrict orders from specific countries in your store.

This is completely possible with the help of our application LockOn - Restrict Store Content. 

The application comes packed with multiple locking mechanisms that you can take advantage of. According to your use case, restricting your store's collection, products, and pages based on the geolocation of your Shopify consumers will be the ideal solution, ensuring that no user from the restricted country can place an order.

I hope that the solution I offered answers your question.

Thanks and Regards.

[TheSaltyLife]

Can you do that at the variant level?

[Elias]

Hey, @TheSaltyLife.

Absolutely! You can add specific variants to the shipping profiles, and the shipping profiles can contain different shipping zones. 

Let us know if you have any other questions! 

[miniOrange_inc]

Certainly! We can tailor an integration at the variant level on our LockOn - Restrict Store Content application for you.
 
Please let us know if you're interested or if you have any further questions.