An order lands from a country you don’t ship to. You spot it two days later, refund it, eat the payment processing fee, and hope the customer doesn’t leave a review about it. Meanwhile the same product is still sitting there, visible and purchasable, to every other shopper in that region.
It doesn’t have to work that way.
CBR PRO: Country Based Restrictions for WooCommerce uses WooCommerce geolocation to decide what each visitor can see and buy based on their country, then blocks the order before it reaches your dashboard. Shipping zones control your rates. CBR PRO controls whether the sale happens at all.
This guide walks through the full setup: native shipping zones first, then product, category, shipping class and payment restrictions on top.
How to set up country-based shipping restrictions step by step
1. Configure your selling and shipping locations first
Go to WooCommerce → Settings → General and set your selling locations and shipping locations. This stops rates from appearing for regions you don’t serve, but it does not hide products or stop someone from adding a restricted item to their cart. That gap is what the rest of this guide closes.
2. Turn on geolocation, then install CBR PRO
In WooCommerce → Settings → General, set Default customer location to a geolocation option so WooCommerce’s MaxMind database is active. CBR PRO reads the shipping country from a logged-in customer’s account address, and falls back to IP geolocation for guests. There’s a Force geolocation setting if you want IP detection to win every time.
3. Decide how restricted products should behave
Open WooCommerce → Country Restrictions → Settings and pick your catalog visibility rule. You can hide restricted products completely, hide them from the shop and search while keeping direct links alive, or leave them visible but non-purchasable. Hiding completely suits compliance cases. Non-purchasable suits stores that want the SEO value of the product page.
4. Restrict individual products and variations
Edit any product and open its Country Based Restrictions tab. Choose whether the country list you select is the only list allowed, or the list to exclude, and save. Variations can carry their own rules, so a single size or format can be region-locked without touching the parent product.
5. Apply bulk rules by shipping class, category or tag
The Bulk Restrictions tab is where this scales. Add a new restriction rule, name it for your own reference, then set Restriction By to Global, Category, Tags, Attribute, Shipping class, or a custom taxonomy. Shipping class is the one most stores miss: if your courier won’t carry lithium batteries or liquids to certain countries, restrict the class once instead of tagging 300 products.
6. Hide payment gateways for specific countries
Open the Checkout Restrictions tab and add a rule targeting either billing country or shipping country. Select the payment methods and choose Include or Exclude. This is how you keep a local-only gateway off the checkout for international buyers, or block a gateway that your processor doesn’t support in a given market.
7. Write restriction messages customers can act on
CBR PRO gives you separate messages for the product page, the cart, the category page and product listings, plus control over where the product message appears (before title, after price, after add to cart, and more). Say what’s unavailable and why, not just “not available in your country.” A line about where they can buy it instead keeps the visit useful.
8. Test with the debug toolbar before you go live
Enable the debug toolbar in Settings. It shows the detected country in a front-end bar that only administrators can see, so you can confirm rules fire correctly without touching a live customer session. The optional country detection widget does the same job for shoppers, letting them switch their detected country while browsing.
Shipping zones vs country restrictions
| Job to be done | Where it belongs |
|---|---|
| Show or hide shipping rates by region | WooCommerce shipping zones |
| Hide restricted products from the catalog | CBR PRO catalog visibility |
| Block add to cart for a blocked country | CBR PRO product rules |
| Restrict an entire shipping class | CBR PRO bulk rules |
| Hide payment gateways by country | CBR PRO checkout restrictions |
| Stop the order at Place Order | CBR PRO checkout validation |
| Test rules as another country | CBR PRO debug toolbar |
Conclusion
Shipping zones tell customers what a delivery costs. They don’t stop a customer in a restricted country from filling a cart and paying you for something you can’t legally or practically ship. CBR PRO closes that gap at the catalog, the cart and the checkout, so the orders you can’t fulfil never reach your dashboard.
🌍 Ready to stop selling into countries you can’t ship to?
Set your rules once by product, category or shipping class, and let geolocation enforce them on every page load.
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