Shopify merchants in the bid to give the best and quality service to their customers, have a store protection scheme that gives you as the owner the protection you want without hindering the service that you provide. A typical example of that is using a country blocker app to restrict traffic.
Store protection can be done in many ways for an e-commerce Shopify store. Some of the ways include content protection where you place some restrictions on how third parties can use your images or text outside your store’s landing page.
Another way to protect your store is to restrict unwanted traffic. You might be wondering how a store would tag some traffic that gets to its site as unwanted. As a Shopify merchant when you get traffic from countries where you cannot ship your items to or you do not want to sell such traffic is not wanted because they might be misleading when making decisions.
There are many reasons why store owners restrict sales to certain locations. Most times, it is because they do not have the capacity to sell to those places or some underlying factors such as shipping.
5 Benefits Of Using Geo-Location Country Blocker For Shopify Stores
How To Block Unwanted Traffic On Your Store Using Country Blocker App
Geo-location country blocker restriction is a way of activating a protection mechanism for your store. The Shopify app store has provided store owners with third-party apps to help them activate these restrictions. Restrictions can be done as broadly as blocking a country and as specific as blacklisting certain IP addresses.
Reasons Why You Need To Create A Blacklist For Your Store
#Shipping Rates or Delivery Challenges
When experiencing frequent issues with shipping to certain countries, most online retailers might want to stop selling to those locations.
If shipping rates are too high due to distance, it would inflate the total price a customer is paying to get an item which might be discouraging and cause customers to add to the traffic numbers without being converted to sales.
Difficulty in order fulfillment might put a store’s reputation with customers in a bad light and some of these challenges might be due to shipping processes. When shipping gets delayed or takes a longer period of days to get to customers due to distance and causes the seller to incur extra cost or effort of tracking the order, sellers might want to restrict the locations they sell to.
#Spam Bots
Spamming is one thing in e-commerce that store owners have to deal with using one technique or the other. Spam visits to a store inflate the traffic and can be misleading when making marketing decisions or calculating business metrics such as revenue per visitor.
To reduce the effect of spam bots on Shopify stores, one way to do this is to block traffic from the country the bots originate from if it will not be harmful to your sales growth.
Read: Spam Visits on Shopify Stores: How To Handle and Treat Spamming
When the country of origin for the spam bots is a major sales point for your store, you can be specific with the blocking by looking out for common IP addresses used by the bots and blacklisting the IP address range.
Restricting VPN bypass is another way of handling spam bots. Spam bots usually gain access to websites using proxy IP. Thus blocking VPN access can reduce the spam visits you get to your store.
#Unauthorized Transaction That Results In Chargebacks
Chargeback is one thing no Shopify merchant wants to experience now and then because it dents the reputation of the store.
A fraudulent transaction according to Shopify regulations would result in a chargeback. Typically, sellers keep losing money. One way Shopify helps merchants to handle this challenge using the built-in fraud analysis to notify merchants of suspicious orders.
If it is discovered that such unauthorized transactions come from a location frequently, store owners might want to block the country from accessing their store. This way they can reduce the chargebacks due to fraudulent activities.
#Unwanted Traffic
It will be surprising to tag traffic as unwanted right? That is it for e-commerce store owners especially when their business capacity is minimal. To provide customers with the best service, merchants restrict their sales activities to certain locations.
Merchants might be affected by unwanted traffic if their marketing strategies rely on traffic statistics. Traffic may be misleading since not all of it can be converted into sales since the store does not sell there.
#Issues Due To Supply Chain
A Shopify merchant has to place restrictions on certain countries because their distributor does not sell to that location. It would be unwise to take orders from such a location since they won’t be able to fulfill such orders. Hence, the reason for blocking the countries.
This might be peculiar to dropshipping because store owners might not have to get physical with the products. When the supply source for your niche of products does not sell to certain countries, it might be difficult or require extra cost to sell to such countries. To reduce the rate at which you will have to turn orders down, a store owner might want to block visitors from those countries.
Edward, a Shopify merchant was able to block certain countries using the StoreBundle Geo-Location Country Blocker app because his supply source does not deliver to those countries. Hence, no reason to keep the traffic from USA, Malaysia, and India coming to their store.
Hello,
Thank you the App is working fine. The main reason that I installed the app was to specifically block certain countries i.e. USA, India, Malaysia, and a few others, the reason we block those countries is that we are not permitted to sell to them as per our agreement with our primary distributor.
Edward, Scintera Pty Ltd
How To Block Certain Countries From Your Shopify Store Using Country Blocker App
Creating a block list for countries for a Shopify store requires that you install a Shopify app that can help you achieve that.
StoreBundle is an all-in-one Shopify marketing app that features a Geo-location country blocker app with which you can block traffic based on country. The country blocker features your blacklist log.
The redirect feature is beneficial to store owners with different stores in different locations. With the StoreBundle app, you can redirect your customers to other stores that can serve them better.
Final Thoughts
One of the ways to manage the impact of blocking users from certain countries from gaining access to your store is to whitelist the IP addresses of genuine customers from such locations. When creating your block rule, you can indicate how customers can reach out to you if interested in buying an item. This works when you are restricting the country due to spam bots.
StoreBundle features a country blocker and redirects app built to help Shopify merchants to restrict suspicious or unwanted visitors from accessing your store. The whitelist feature helps you lift the block ban off certain IP addresses from a blocked country. This is to help you manage the effect of a block rule you created.
With StoreBundle, you can have multiple blacklist rules for multiple countries running at the same time.
