Shopify how-to
How to restrict shipping by state on Shopify
Shopify has no built-in way to say “this product cannot ship to that state.” If you sell anything regulated — supplements, alcohol, plants, knives — you have three realistic options. Here is how each works and where each breaks.
Option 1: Shipping profiles (the native workaround)
Shopify shipping profiles let you charge different rates by destination, and by removing rates you can make a region un-checkout-able. Two problems make this fragile for compliance:
- A product can belong to only one shipping profile at a time. Two products with different restriction sets — or one product restricted for two different reasons — hit a wall.
- Buyers see “no shipping rates available,” not an explanation. For regulated goods, an unexplained dead end costs the rest of the cart too.
Rate-based workarounds can also push you toward carrier-calculated shipping, which Shopify gates behind advanced plans or annual billing.
Option 2: Review orders manually
Let every order through and refund the ones you can’t ship. This works at very low volume, but each refund costs payment-processing fees, support time, and an unhappy customer — and one missed order is a compliance incident, not an inconvenience.
Option 3: Checkout validation (what ShipEmbargo does)
Shopify Functions let an app validate the cart natively inside checkout. ShipEmbargo uses this to check the delivery address against your rules: if a cart contains a restricted product going to a blocked state, checkout stops and shows the buyer a message you wrote.
- No theme code and no storefront scripts.
- Enforcement runs on Shopify’s servers, on every Shopify plan, with no carrier-calculated shipping requirement.
- Rules target products, collections, or tags — overlapping restriction sets are fine.
Common questions
Can Shopify block a single product from one state natively?
Not directly. Shipping profiles work at the rate level and allow only one profile per product, so product-level state blocking generally requires a checkout validation app.
Do I need Shopify Plus for checkout validation?
No. Validation functions run on every Shopify plan — that includes ShipEmbargo.
This guide is general information for merchants, not legal advice. Regulations change — verify current law for your products and destinations.