Have you ever received tons of spam traffic from a country that is not even your target market? If so, you need to reconsider the visibility of your store on the Internet.
You see, many stores are open to the entire world, openly inviting data breaches and risking revenue where there are no chances of any reward. With so much effort and money spent on your products and services, it is important for you to display them in regions that make the most sense for your business.
Here is a detailed guide with key benefits of country restrictions to help you better understand why you should consider blocking content from certain regions.
We will begin by explaining how country restrictions work to have a solid understanding before diving to the benefits.
What are Country Restrictions?
If you have ever come across messages like “blocked access” or “your access to the site has been blocked”, it could be because of country restrictions.
Country restrictions enable store owners to hide certain content like products, pages, and posts. Using the user’s IP address, their location is detected (Geo Location) and if they are present in the restricted zones, the content is not shown to them.
You can choose to hide your whole website or specific sections as you like. To enable the feature on your store, you can add a custom code or use a plugin like the PrestaShop Country Restriction.
6 Reasons Why You Should Implement Country Restrictions
Here are some major reasons why you should consider and explore country restrictions on your Prestashop store.
1. Keep Your Site Safe
Making a website has become very simple, and even people with no coding background can get started within minutes, but are those sites safe? The simple answer is No!
More and more websites are now using standard CMS such as PrestaShop (300,000 sites), WordPress (43.5% of all websites), Wix (30 million sites), etc. While using these platforms creates ease for store owners, the known vulnerabilities can allow attackers to easily exploit bugs and weak spots in the software.
Although the site can be kept safe by using updated versions with bug fixes, a better solution is to consider country restrictions to block the threat altogether. You can make a list of the countries from where you are getting the most security threats, and if your target audience does not live there, simply block those countries.
2. Save Efforts on Targeted Campaigns
Do you want only the most relevant customers to view your site, who are actually interested in your products? If so, content blocking can help you with that.
You see, your audience is composed of multiple genders, ethnicities, races, etc, so there is no point in wasting efforts where the chances of getting any return are slim. Blocking certain content by countries is a great idea because you gain a laser focus on your audience.
Additionally, by blocking certain products and pages, you can offer a tailored experience to your customers so they can see exactly what they need instead of viewing a multitude of irrelevant items. E.g., you can block sale products from countries outside your continent if you dont wish to ship that far.
3. Improve Shopping Experience
Customers nowadays are harder to get as they have become increasingly picky with so many options. While shopping, users look for the best products, the lowest rates, the smoothest checkout, speedy downloads, pretty product images, etc.
This means that optimizing your store for your customers is very important and country restrictions can be one way, to get that done. If you tailor your site for your audience, and show only the things that matter to them, you have a higher chance of impressing them.
With country restrictions, you can show relevant products, pages, and posts to users, and block content that doesn’t comply with their needs. Let’s take an example: if you sell alcohol-based items, it’s a wise step to ban these items from Muslim countries as those regions will not be your target audience.
Another example could be to show your winter sale items in countries that are currently experiencing winter – or will receive their packages on time, before the season ends.
4. Better Manage Site Speed and Performance
Do you remember the time when Kylie Jenner launched her lip liners? The site crashed within minutes before the entire stock was sold out.
Although she made a lot of money, the same cannot be said for every website. The Kylie Jenner example shows how too much traffic can negatively impact a site, slowing it down and affecting the bandwidth.
When too many users visit your site, the server is under too much load, reducing site speed and lowering bandwidth (slower data transfer). Thus, one way to ensure your site works smoothly is to limit site traffic, and that can easily be done by restricting access of unwanted users from certain countries.
If your site frequently faces slow speed and lower bandwidth issues, you can check the locations from where you are getting heavy traffic. After you spot these countries, you can block access from those regions, if they are not relevant.
5. Streamline Your Web Analytics
Can you make good decisions off of wrong data? Certainly not, and if your decisions are wrong, so will the outcome. To ensure the right choices for your store, you need to remove irrelevant data. One way to do so, is to block unnecessary customers from poluting your customer base.
E.g., if you are analyzing the performance of a luxury product, you don’t need data from all customers but your target market only. Therefore, you should block access to the luxury product for users from the lower income class to ensure you dont get misleading data to begin with.
6. Enhance Legal Compliance
Just because you are not doing something illegal doesn’t mean you are always following the law. What might be legal in one country can be illegal in another. For instance, the shipment of gems and precious metals to Russia is prohibited. This implies that if you sell across the globe, you should look into the laws and legal regulations of each before advertising, displaying, and selling products in those regions.
Keeping a check on legal compliance can save you the trouble of getting into a legal battle that could potentially hurt your store’s reputation.
How to Restrict Content by Country in Prestashop – 4 Steps
Now that you understand why you need to implement country restrictions, it is time to explore ways to add the feature to your website. For simplicity, we will be using the Prestashop Country Restriction plugin as an example. To get started, follow these steps:
1. Install & Activate the Plugin
Simply visit the plugin product page and download the module file. After that, go to your Prestashop admin and click Modules > Module Manager. From there, search for the plugin file and click Configure. Now, you can start setting up the plugin for your store and adjust various settings as you like.
2. Restrict Whole Store or Specific Sections
The plugin gives you the option to either block the whole site or specific sections from a country. To do so, firstly, create a rule, which simply means creating a condition. Using a rule-based approach will allow you to choose when to block content for which section and from which country.
To create a rule, simply click the “+ sign” within the Rules section. From there, select a country and choose to block the whole site or a few sections as needed.
3. Choose to Hide Specific Products & Pages
Within the Rules section, you will find the Product and Pages Settings, and Restriction Setting. These will allow you to choose which pages and products to hide.
Each adjustment you make here, will be saved in the form of a rule, and you can create multiple rules/conditions to hide content in multiple scenarios.
4. Choose to Hide Specific Payment & Shipping Methods
Again, from the Rules setting, you can click the Payment/Shipping Method option. From there, you can select specific payment and shipping methods to hide from certain countries. Hiding certain methods will ensure users can pay through methods most suited to them and can get products delivered without any inconvenience.
Conclusion
In this guide, we explored the benefits of using country restrictions and how to add the feature to your web store. We found out that limiting content by country not only keeps your store safe but also helps with customer targeting and decision-making. If you wish to restrict countries on your site, using a plugin is a smart way to go around it.
We hope the guide was helpful and will allow you to run your site in the desired locations smoothly. For more content on ecommerce, web tools, online business trends, and more, you can visit Addify.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How to block traffic from a country in Prestashop?
Using the plugin Country Restriction by Product, Categories & CMS Pages, you can easily hide the whole site or desired sections from specific countries. The plugin does not require any coding and can block traffic from unwanted countries within minutes.
2. What are Prestashop Country Restrictions?
The Prestashop platform allows you to limit traffic by country by either adding a custom code or using a plugin. These two methods are flexible, and you can customize them as you like.
3. Which countries should I block on my website?
Based on where your target market is located, legal regulations, and data of past malicious activities, you should consider blocking a country. If a product isn’t allowed in a country, you should restrict the product from that region. If you are getting spam traffic from a country that isn’t your target market, you should block that region as well.
4. Does blocking countries affect SEO?
No, as long as you keep it easy for Google to crawl your pages, your SEO won’t get hurt by country restrictions. To do so, show a message to users from restricted countries telling them of the restriction while allowing Google to access your site easily.
