How can I specify the Countries/States that I ship to?

In our previous two articles regarding Shipping Settings and Shipping Methods, we stated that Shift4Shop shipping is composed of two separate sections that work closely together. However, there is a third section that can also come into play when configuring your cart's shipping capabilities.

The third section of your overall shipping configuration is the Shipping Countries section. In this section you will be able to specify which countries and states you are willing to deliver to. When you first set up your Shift4Shop store, ALL countries and ALL states are enabled. However, you may have specific needs which require you to limit the scope of your shipping area.

For example, you may sell region specific media like Blu-Ray movies that only play on devices sold in specific markets, and selling them to the wrong market would only increase the amount of returned merchandise you get. Perhaps there are legal, or even product licensing reasons for limiting the areas you ship to. Whatever the case may be, you can specify exactly which countries your cart is able to ship to.

Shipping Countries

To update the available shipping countries and states, do the following:

Go to Settings >Shipping
Scroll down until you get to the "Country List" section and click on the "Edit Countries" button
Check the checkbox next to country you want to deliver to, uncheck countries you do not want to deliver to.
Click the Save button located at the top right to commit your changes.

Important
Do not uncheck all the countries or else the store will no longer work properly. Your customers will not be able to check out if there are no countries to choose.

You may also want to limit or enable specific states (these can be states/territories/provinces/etc) within your selected countries. For example, in the case of the United States as the country, your catalog of products cannot be shipped to a specific states due to their individual state laws. Or perhaps you only want to ship to specific provinces in Canada. Whatever the case may be, you can also edit the country selections to enable/disable or even add/remove specific "states" within these countries.

Go to Settings >Shipping
Scroll down until you get to the "Country List" section and click on the "Edit Countries" button
Go to the country listing that you'd like to edit and look to the far right to click on it's "Actions/Check States" link.

From here, you can do one of the following:

Check the checkbox next to a state to make that state available and click Save.
Uncheck the checkbox next to a state to make that state unavailable and click Save.
To remove a state, check the Remove checkbox next to a state to sand click Save.
To add a new state, in the Add New State section, enter the name and two letter abbreviation for the state and click
(Check your shipping carrier for the appropriate abbreviations)
Save

For your convenience, United States and Canadian Provinces have been pre-populated for you.

Note
Please be aware of how your shipping carriers handle specific territories. For example, some shipping carriers consider Puerto Rico as its own country, while some carriers consider it as an applicable state/territory for the US. Therefore you may need to specify Puerto Rice as both a country AND a US state to accommodate multiple carriers.

As a further example, the Canary Islands are considered part of Spain for some carriers as well as its own county by others. (Check with your shipping carrier for specific information)