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Restricting Products

Restricting Products

There are two methods for restricting products in Shopify and blocking them from checkout.

  • Restrict Shopify Markets - Un-publish the product for international markets in the Shopify Product Editor.

  • Global-e Restriction Tags - Restrict the product for international countries in the Global-e Merchant Portal or using Product Tags.

Which method should be used?

Select the method according to relevant condition:

Condition

Method to use

Notes

Should restricted products continue to appear on the storefront for countries they are blocked in?

Yes Use Global-e Restrictions TagGlobal-e methods

No Restrict Shopify Markets

The Global-e method will only block the product from being added to cart or being checked out with. It will still appear on the storefront in search results and PLP pages, and the PDP is still visible. The Shopify method prevents the product from appearing on the storefront in restricted markets entirely.

Is merchant non-US and sensitive to SEO results? (i.e. their products not appearing on Google results)

Yes Use Global-e Restrictions Tag

No Restrict Shopify Markets

Shopify’s method of unpublishing a product from the storefront may result in the products not being indexed by Google bots, since it will display a “404 Page not found” for unpublished markets. This may lead to SEO issues, as the product will not be indexed by Google.

Restricting Shopify Markets

In Shopify, use the Publishing Products with Markets feature to specify in which markets to sell products. Markets that are not selected will be blocked for the product. This step can be performed using the product editor, bulk editor, or via CSV import.

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The product will not appear on Liquid storefronts and will be blocked at checkout if the country is switched.

The product restriction is indicated in the Checkout page and the item will be removed when clicking the Continue button.

Limitations

Using the Shopify method will result in the product pages for blocked countries returning a 404 - Not found error. This can create several issues. The product might not be browsable from unpublished countries. This may cause issues with SEO. Google crawler will receive 404 error on the product link, so that the product will not be indexed for search. Therefore, use this method with caution outside of the United States. Even merchants within the United States may have issues if the Google crawler originates outside the United States. Considering these issues, using Global-e restriction tags might be the preferred approach.

Syncing Global-e Restrictions to Shopify

Global-e can sync restrictions to Shopify, causing them to become unpublished in Shopify, using the Shopify publishing feature. Please reach out to your Global-e Customer Success Manager to discuss enabling this feature.

Global-e Restrictions Tag

Restrict a product tag for all countries

This applies to all markets.

  1. Tag products with the Restrictions product tag of merchants choice. Global-e configures the tag.

  2. Product appears on the Merchant site but will be prevented from adding to cart and will be blocked at checkout, though the site does not indicate which product is Restricted.

  3. Restriction removal is done through Global-e Merchant Portal.

Configuration

Configure restricted products as follows:

  1. Merchant configures restricted products with tag of their choice.

  2. Global-e configures the same tag on Global-e side.

  3. Products are still restricted if tag is removed, it requires manual removal through the Global-e Merchant Portal.

Alternatively:

Limitations

  • If a restriction tag is added to a new product, the product must be added to the cart and reach checkout before the restriction is applied on the Global-e side. To work around this, the merchant can send a CSV file of the restricted products to Global-e for a manual update, or simulate a checkout as soon as applying the tag.

  • If a merchant has restrictions applied in the Merchant Portal only for a few variants of a product, Global-e scripts will restrict all variants on the Product Details Page (PDP).

Headless Merchants

For headless implementations, both Global-e and Shopify restriction methods will only prevent checkout. It is up to the merchant whether to display the restricted products on their storefront.

The merchant can query the product using the Shopify Admin GraphQL API (see https://shopify.dev/api/examples/international-pricing#query-available-countries-and-currencies) to determine if the product is published or unpublished for the market in Shopify.

Example query:

query GetProduct($id:ID!, $country:CountryCode){ 
    product(id:$id) { 
        id 
        title 
        description
        bodyHtml
        isGiftCard
        publishedInContext (
            context: { country: $country}
        )
      }
  }
  Variables
  {
    "id": "gid://shopify/Product/9532092317987",
    "country": "AU"
}

The merchant can also query whether a product is restricted by Global-e using the ProductCountryS API.

However, a better approach may be to use the Syncing Global-e restrictions to Shopify feature mentioned previously. This allows merchants to retrieve the Global-e restrictions through the Shopify API directly.

Please reach out to your Customer Success Manager to discuss your options.