Blockify vs. DigiBorder for blocking digital sales by country

The quick verdict

The apps at a glance

What Blockify does well

Blockify has been in the App Store since 2018 and it shows. It blocks by IP, country, state and city, catches bots, VPNs and proxies on paid plans, and redirects visitors by location. The analytics tell you who's hitting your store and from where. For stores dealing with scrapers, card testing or fake orders, it's one of the most complete tools you can install, and it holds Built for Shopify status.

The free plan is also genuinely useful: two active IP or country rules, forever. If you need to keep a couple of high-fraud regions off your storefront, that might be all you ever pay.

Where it falls short for digital products

• It checks the visitor, not the buyer. The country comes from the IP address. A buyer in a blocked country who connects through a US VPN looks like a US visitor. Blockify's VPN detection on Premium narrows that gap, but it's a detection game; it never reads the billing address.
• Its checkout blocking is about identity, not country. The listing describes checkout blocks by email, phone and name, and "block checkout with conditions" on the $29.99 Enterprise plan. It doesn't say any of that checks the billing country.
• It blocks the whole store. Visitors from a blocked country can't see your homepage, blog or physical products. If you only need to stop downloads, you lose everything else from that country too.
• It can't tell a download from a T-shirt. The listing doesn't mention product or collection targeting, so a rule for digital licensing also stops physical sales.

What DigiBorder does differently

DigiBorder runs as a Shopify checkout rule. When a buyer completes checkout, Shopify asks it whether the cart can go through; it reads the billing country and, if the cart holds digital products from a country you've blocked, stops it with a message. It never looks up an IP. Your store stays open to everyone, and carts with only physical products always pass.

Pricing side by side

When Blockify is the better choice

If your problem is traffic, such as bots draining your bandwidth, card testers, or scrapers copying your catalogue, Blockify is the better tool and DigiBorder won't help you at all. The same goes if you want visitors from some regions redirected to a different store.

If your problem is who you're allowed to sell digital products to, Blockify is answering a different question. You'd be paying to block an IP when the rule you're following is about the buyer's location as shown by their billing address.

Three real situations

Feature lists only go so far, so here's how each app handles three situations I hear about from digital sellers all the time.

The pattern is the same each time. Blockify draws a line around your store; DigiBorder draws a line around the sale. For fraud, the first is what you want. For tax and rights, it's the second.

Setting up the same rule in each

In Blockify you create a block rule for the country, choose block or redirect, and design the page blocked visitors see. In DigiBorder you open the app from your Shopify admin, choose "Block selected countries" (or, on Basic, "Allow selected countries"), pick the countries, and save. Then test a checkout with a billing address from a blocked country; you should see the restriction message instead of the pay button. Both take a few minutes. The difference is what the rule is attached to.

Can you run both?

Yes, and for stores with fraud problems it's a sensible setup. Blockify filters traffic when pages load; DigiBorder checks the billing country when checkout completes. They don't touch the same part of Shopify, so they don't conflict. Start DigiBorder on Free, block the one country that matters most, and see whether that covers you. Read the full roundup of ten country blockers for the rest of the field.