Shipping zones & geo-detection

Domestic orders arrive faster than international ones. Zones let the widget reflect that — automatically on the Pro plan.

How zones work

A zone is a group of destination countries with its own minimum and maximum transit time (the days between dispatch and delivery). Every store has a default zone; you can add country-specific zones on top of it.

The default zone All plans

The default zone applies when no other zone matches — and it's the only zone on Free and Growth. Set it to your primary market. Example for a French store shipping mostly domestically:

  • Default zone transit: 2–4 days

Country zones Pro

On Pro, add as many zones as you need in ShipsBy → Settings → Zones:

  1. Click Add zone and name it (e.g. “EU neighbors”).
  2. Select the countries it covers (e.g. Belgium, Germany, Spain, Italy).
  3. Enter min and max transit days (e.g. 3–6 days).
  4. Save. The live preview lets you switch country to check each zone's output.

A country can belong to only one zone. Anything not covered falls back to the default zone.

Geo-detection Pro

With geo-detection enabled, the widget picks the right zone for each visitor automatically, using the country that Shopify Markets already exposes to your theme (the same mechanism that localizes prices and currency).

  • Detection happens entirely in the visitor's browser — nothing is sent to our servers and no cookies are set. See the privacy policy.
  • If the visitor uses your storefront's country selector, ShipsBy follows their explicit choice.
  • If the country can't be determined, the widget quietly uses the default zone — it never breaks or shows nothing.

Without Pro: every visitor sees the default zone estimate. That's perfectly fine for stores that ship overwhelmingly to one country — upgrade when international traffic becomes meaningful.

Example setup: French store shipping to the EU and North America

Example zone matrix — adjust to your carriers' real performance.
ZoneCountriesTransit
Default (France)France2–4 days
EU neighborsBE, DE, ES, IT, NL, LU3–6 days
Rest of EUOther EU countries4–8 days
North AmericaUS, CA6–12 days

Tip: be slightly pessimistic on the max. A parcel that arrives a day early delights; one that arrives a day late generates a ticket.

Next: per-product overrides for items that need their own timeline.

Still stuck? Email us at anadvisory.fr@gmail.com.

We read everything and reply within one business day.