Securify help for Shopify merchants
When to block a country
Block a country when nobody there can buy from you, or when one place keeps sending you trouble. Leave it open if you might sell there.
Good reasons to block a country
- You do not ship there. Visits from that country cannot become orders, so a block can cost you little.
- Fake orders keep coming from one place. Several flagged orders or chargebacks from the same country point to a pattern, not one bad buyer.
- Bot traffic comes from one place. Blocking it can keep your analytics closer to your real shoppers.
- Rules stop you selling there. Some products cannot be sold in some countries.
When not to block a country
- You ship there, even a little. A block stops real customers along with the bad ones.
- You had one bad order. Block that email or IP address instead.
- The country only looks risky. Yellow countries on the map have been flagged by our risk engine, based on threat data from stores we protect. Check your own logs before you block one.
- Your team or suppliers work there. You can block it, but give them a device pass or add them to the Allow List first.
What a block can cost you
- Customers abroad. A customer travelling in a blocked country can be stopped, even if you ship to their home address.
- Wrong locations. A real customer can sometimes be placed in the wrong country. See Why country blocking is not 100% accurate.
- It can be avoided. Someone determined can use a VPN to appear elsewhere. See When to block VPN users.
A block does not stop Google or Bing. Verified crawlers such as Googlebot and Bingbot pass a country block, unless you block that crawler in Manage Good Bots in Settings.
How to decide
- Open Visitor Logs. Each visit shows its country, and you can type a country's name in the search field. For a VPN visit, the country shown is the VPN's.
- Open your flagged orders in Shopify from Order Protection and see where they ship to. Order Protection does not show an order's country.
- Compare that with where you ship and where your real orders come from.
- If a country sends trouble and no sales, block it.
- Check the blocked visits in Visitor Logs over the next few days.
Keep Location Verification Appeal on in Settings, so a real customer who was blocked by mistake can prove where they are.
Still stuck? Open the chat bubble in the Securify app or email dev@otp.plus.