Selling Internationally on Shopify: Restricted Countries, Sanctions and Customer Screening
Distinguish Shopify unsupported regions, your shipping policy, country-risk alerts and legally restricted transactions before fulfilling cross-border orders.
4 min read
Prevent problematic international shipments by combining Shopify's platform restrictions, deliberate shipping settings, party screening and transaction review. A country-risk alert may require investigation; it is not automatically a legal prohibition. Conversely, a permitted shipping destination does not make every customer or product transaction permissible. MatchAudit adds country-risk findings and party checks to the order-review workflow.
There are four different country decisions
On small screens, scroll the table sideways to compare all columns.
| Layer | Who sets it? | What the merchant should check |
|---|---|---|
| Platform support | Shopify | Unsupported regions, product origin and platform terms |
| Shipping availability | Merchant and shipping partners | Markets, shipping zones, rates and service availability |
| Country-risk policy | Merchant using relevant risk sources | Review triggers, business risk appetite and escalation |
| Legal restrictions | Applicable authorities | Parties, destination, goods, services and transaction-specific rules |
A restriction in one layer should not be used as shorthand for the others. A merchant can decline a country for commercial reasons without alleging that its residents are sanctioned. A higher-risk jurisdiction may call for additional diligence while some transactions remain permissible.
Read Shopify's current unsupported-region policy
Shopify's unsupported countries and regions page currently names Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Crimea and the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics. It describes restrictions involving accounts, access, product origin and shipping. This is a dated platform-policy reference checked on 10 October 2026, not a universal list of countries sanctioned under every legal regime.
Consult that live page when setting up a market or destination. Platform restrictions and government sanctions can change on different schedules and have different scopes.
A destination filter cannot identify every restricted buyer
Consider an illustrative electronics distributor shipping to an ordinary commercial warehouse in a supported country. The legal purchaser is based elsewhere and uses a third-party receiving agent. The shipping country alone tells you little about whether the buyer or another party is listed.
