If you’ve paid attention to my content, then you know that I recommend targeting only one country per Shopify store.
You should streamline everything on your store.
Everything needs to be aligned with the country you’re selling to: The language of your store, ads and customer support, the domain ending, and most importantly the targeting of your advertising.
So let’s say you want to sell to the United Kingdom only.
In that case you would set up your store in English, get a co.uk domain or a .com domain and set up the currency to pounds.
Now what happens if someone from the United States or from Germany somehow stumbles upon your store through word of mouth or from a search engine and decides to buy a product from you?
Even though you’re targeting a specific country with your ads and marketing, you might get a few orders from other countries, too.
Here’s how to handle this:
First of all you need to set up a shipping zone for your main country. I recommend using weight based shipping rates since this gives you enough flexibility to use free shipping and also free plus shipping offers on the same store, without having too many headaches.
But unless you set up a shipping rate for the rest of the world, anyone outside of the United Kingdom won’t be able to finish the checkout.
Shopify by default has a shipping zone called “Rest of the world” that is applied if someone places an order from outside your main shipping zone. You can either use and edit that setting and set up a generic shipping rate for the rest of the world. Or if you only want to ship to specific countries, you would delete this zone and set up additional shipping zones for specific countries you hand-pick.
So now, even though your ads are targeting the UK, if someone orders from Germany or from the United States, people can still check out and are charged the correct shipping and handling rate.
Regarding the fulfillment on Aliexpress:
Usually suppliers ship to most major countries, so you can always just change the shipping country to whatever you want while buying the item on Aliexpress. If a supplier can’t ship to a particular country, you can look for an alternative supplier for the same item on Aliexpress.
And worst case, if you get an order and you simply can’t fulfill it, just refund the payment and remove that country from your zones.
It’s not the end of the world 🙂