How to exclude customers from specific countries

  • Resolved atheerhuwa

    (@atheerhuwa)


    4 years, 10 months ago

    Hi,

    In the settings of Woocommerce, I chose a few “Selling location(s)” under “Sell to specific countries” and did not include the country in which I live or any other EU country. But I was still able to buy from my store using a credit card from my country but choosing a different country from the drop down menu at checkout which is in another continent.

    Under “Default customer location” I tried Geolocate with and without cache, but that did not prevent me from buying either.

    For EU VAT this could cause problems especially for selling digital goods as I only have these two pieces of evidence to prove that the customer does not live in the EU and that I am not liable to pay VAT to any EU country. These two pieces should not contradict.

    • This topic was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by atheerhuwa.
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter atheerhuwa

    (@atheerhuwa)

    Just noticed something.
    In Status – Logs the following errors:
    geolocation-2020-01-19-3a3201f5f5a6e6b9d22668fe74425dad.log

    2020-01-19T22:19:53+00:00 NOTICE Unable to download GeoIP Database: A valid URL was not provided.
    2020-01-19T23:14:32+00:00 NOTICE Unable to download GeoIP Database: A valid URL was not provided.

    And on another website I have the following errors in the log:
    geolocation-2019-12-05-27c587b349b1985e19a649ebba66139b.log
    2019-12-05T22:35:51+00:00 NOTICE Unable to download GeoIP Database: Service Unavailable
    2019-12-05T22:55:00+00:00 NOTICE Unable to download GeoIP Database: Service Unavailable

    geolocation-2019-12-05-27c587b349b1985e19a649ebba66139b.log
    2019-12-05T22:35:51+00:00 NOTICE Unable to download GeoIP Database: Service Unavailable
    2019-12-05T22:55:00+00:00 NOTICE Unable to download GeoIP Database: Service Unavailable

    How to fix these issues?

    • This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by atheerhuwa.
    • This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by atheerhuwa.
    • This reply was modified 4 years, 10 months ago by atheerhuwa.

    Hello @atheerhuwa,

    Great questions here. First for the geolocation database. The provider of this service has recently changed their licensing agreement. That is requiring us to make an update to WooCommerce to change how this database is installed. The new workflow will be part of WooCommerce 3.9 which should be out very soon. If you’d like to you, you can install the WooCommerce beta tester plugin and update the site to 3.9 release candidate 4 and it has this workflow ready to go.

    That said, the sell to country option is only compared against what the customer enters at checkout. If they select a billing country that is included in the sell to countries, then the system will allow them to check out.

    If you need to validate that the customer is actually from the country they select at checkout, you could use a payment gateway that supports that type of validation.

    One gateway that can support that is Stripe.

    https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/stripe/#section-37

    If you have any questions, let me know.

    Take care,

    Hi @atheerhuwa,

    With WooCommerce 3.9 released, you should be able to update WooCommerce and get this straightened out. If you do have any issues, please open up a new post and we’ll be happy to help out.

    Thanks!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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