Selling digital products across borders can introduce complex tax and compliance obligations – especially in regions with digital VAT laws like the EU, UK, or Mexico. ThriveCart now lets you configure country-level exclusions for your digital products, giving you full control over where your products are available and ensuring compliance without limiting your business growth.
Why It Matters
Previously, country exclusions were only available for physical products through shipping rules.
With this update, digital products now have the same flexibility — letting you exclude specific countries from purchasing where you’re not VAT-registered or legally permitted to sell.
This feature helps you:
- Prevent sales into countries where you’re not tax compliant
- Avoid unnecessary VAT or digital goods obligations
- Ensure consistent, compliant checkout behavior across all your products
How to Set Up Country Exclusions
You can define which countries your digital products are available in directly from your product settings.
To configure exclusions:
- Go to your Digital Product in ThriveCart.
- Open the Product tab and click the Pricing sub-tab.
- Choose Set product price (for new products) or Edit (for existing products).
- Below the “Limit quantity available?” setting, you’ll find a new section titled “Available in the following locations.”
- From here, you can choose from a few options:
- Select Everywhere (Worldwide) — the default option for all new and existing products.
- Select National – to sell to customer’s within your own country
- Select International – to sell to customer’s outside your country only
- Set Specific Countries, or Specific States – to choose a list of places to sell to
- Anywhere except… – to exclude specific countries and prevent them from purchasing this product
Customizing the Customer Experience
When a customer from an excluded country reaches checkout, you can decide exactly what they see and how the experience behaves.
When you add exclusions, a new Customer experience settings button appears — allowing you to customize what the excluded purchaser will see at checkout.
In the Customer Experience Settings, you can:
- Customize the error message displayed to excluded purchasers (e.g., “This product is not available for purchase in your country.”)
- Or set a redirect URL to direct customers to (such as another product, or your website’s home page).
The text and layout follows the same logic as the “Set out-of-stock options” used for limited quantity products. This ensures your messaging stays clear and professional while preventing unintentional sales.
What Happens at Checkout
Once exclusions are set, ThriveCart automatically validates the purchaser’s country at checkout using a layered detection system:
- Billing Address or Contact Information — if your checkout collects this data.
- IP Address — if no address fields are configured.
If the purchaser’s country matches your exclusion list:
- An inline error message appears, explaining that the product isn’t available in their country OR customer’s are automatically redirected to your redirect URL.
- If using the in-checkout message, the Checkout or Next button is disabled (for multi-step templates).
- Once a valid, non-excluded country is selected, the message disappears and checkout re-enables.
Consistency Across Payment Methods
This validation applies to all digital products and is enforced consistently across:
- Every checkout template
- All payment methods and gateways
No matter how your customer pays, country exclusions will always be honored.
Country exclusions for digital products give you complete control over your sales regions while keeping your checkout simple and transparent.
By combining powerful configuration tools with a smooth customer experience, ThriveCart ensures your business stays compliant – without limiting your reach.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Q: My customer is in a country that I’ve set as available, why are they getting an error?
- A: You’ll want to make sure that the country the customer is entering is selected as an available country within your product settings, but also test the checkout on your side by selecting that customer’s country. If the error is not replicated on your side, or you are not collecting address information in checkout, then it may be that the customer’s browser IP location auto-detected that they are in a country you do not sell to.
- A: You’ll want to make sure that the country the customer is entering is selected as an available country within your product settings, but also test the checkout on your side by selecting that customer’s country. If the error is not replicated on your side, or you are not collecting address information in checkout, then it may be that the customer’s browser IP location auto-detected that they are in a country you do not sell to.
- Q: Why is my customer being automatically redirected to my URL when there are other pricing options available to their country?
- A: If you have set exclusion rules on your first pricing option, the redirect will happen immediately for customers excluded from purchase based on their location. If there are other options available to most or all customers, you’ll want to set those pricing options as first in the list (by dragging the pricing option to the top). Only when customers choose the excluded pricing option would they then be redirected.