How to stop selling digital products to certain countries on Shopify

What Shopify does by itself

Shopify Markets decides which countries you sell to and which prices and currencies buyers see. It doesn't check the billing country against a list for products that don't need shipping, and buyers from countries outside your markets can usually still buy in your main market's currency.

For physical products, the shipping address does the job: you simply don't ship there. Digital products have no shipping address, so nothing stops the sale.

Option 1: an IP country blocker

Country blocker apps look at the visitor's IP address and hide your store, or redirect the visitor, when they come from a blocked country.

• Good for: keeping bot and fraud traffic from some regions away from your whole store.
• Weak spot: a VPN changes the IP country, so anyone determined can get through.
• Side effect: it blocks the whole store, including physical products you may be happy to sell, and travellers who are abroad.
• It doesn't look at who pays: a buyer in an allowed country can still pay with a billing address from a blocked one.

Option 2: a billing-country checkout rule

A checkout rule runs on Shopify's servers when the buyer completes checkout. It reads the billing country they pay with and stops the order if your rule doesn't allow it. This is how DigiBorder works.

• Good for: licensing, tax and legal limits, where what matters is who buys and where they are billed.
• A VPN doesn't change the billing country, and the rule runs before the order exists, so there's nothing to cancel afterwards.
• It covers express checkouts: Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal, including the buttons on product and cart pages.
• Your store stays open. Only checkouts with restricted digital products are stopped; physical-only carts go through.
• Limits: Shopify runs checkout rules only in online checkout, so POS sales and orders created in the admin or by other apps aren't checked. The rule uses the billing country the buyer enters, not the card's issuing country.

Option 3: review orders by hand

You can let every order through and cancel the ones from countries you can't sell to. It costs nothing to set up, but by then the download link has usually been sent, the payment fees are spent, and refunds take your time. It works as a stopgap for a handful of orders a month.

Set up a billing-country rule with DigiBorder

1. Install DigiBorder from the Shopify App Store. The Free plan blocks one country right away; Basic and Strict have a 7-day free trial.
2. Choose "Block selected countries" to exclude a few countries, or, on Basic and above, "Allow selected countries" to sell only where you choose.
3. Pick the countries. The rule applies to products marked as not requiring shipping in Shopify.
4. On Basic and above, decide whether carts with both digital and physical items are checked too, and write the message buyers see.
5. Save and activate, then test a checkout with a billing address from a blocked country.