Not selling a product in one country

This is a native setting, it is on every plan, and it takes about a minute. Market catalogs decide which products exist in which country — "To exclude a product, select its checkbox, and then click Exclude from catalog." No app, no rule, no code, and no limit on how many country markets you create.

So if you landed here expecting to be told it cannot be done: it can, and you should go and do it now.

What is worth two more minutes is knowing what the shopper in that country actually experiences, because it is blunter than most merchants assume.

What they see

A redirect, not an explanation. "If a customer visits a product page for a product that isn't available in their market, then they're redirected to your store's homepage." Somebody who clicks your link from an email, an ad, or a friend's message lands on your front page with no idea why. That is fine when the product was never meant for them, and poor when they were sent the link on purpose.

It leaves their search too. "When a customer searches your store, the results include only products that are published in their market." Which is usually what you want — no point offering something you cannot ship them.

And nothing tells them it exists elsewhere. If your reason for excluding a product is regulatory or a distribution agreement, the silence is correct. If your reason is temporary — no stock, no courier, no certification yet — you may prefer a page saying so to a redirect that reads as a broken link.

The two gates people forget

A product is visible only when both of these are true:

"For a product to be available on a sales channel, the product must be included in a catalog assigned to the market and made available to the channel on the product details page."

So "it is in the catalog" is not enough on its own, and neither is "it is published to the online store". When a product has vanished somewhere it should be visible, this pair is the first thing to check — usually it was excluded from one market months ago and nobody remembered.

Products appearing where they should not? Describe what should be sold where →

The gap worth knowing

Exclusion is manual, and new products are in by default. Add a product and it exists in every market until somebody goes and excludes it. There is no setting that says "anything in this product type is never sold in Germany" — so the control depends on whoever adds the product remembering, every time.

Two partial answers worth knowing before anybody builds anything. Shopify Flow can publish and unpublish products to a publication, and a market catalog is a publication — but whether a market catalog appears in Flow's own list is not something Shopify documents, so test it rather than plan around it. And a CSV import carries a Published column, which is a fast way to fix a backlog but not a rule that holds next month.

For a handful of products that is fine. For a catalogue where new lines arrive weekly and some of them are restricted, it is the kind of quiet gap that gets discovered by a customer rather than by you.

One thing Shopify does not document. Whether an excluded product stays out of that market's search-engine results is not something Shopify documents. It says crawlers are not redirected by location, and that sitemaps include market-specific URLs — but not what happens to an excluded product in the market's own sitemap. If search visibility in that country matters to you legally, check it rather than assume it.

Which route is yours

What Shopivibe does

For the part above, use the setting. Market catalogs are Shopify's own, they work, and adding us to a working setting would be a worse shop, not a better one.

Where this becomes a real request is the gap: "anything we tag as restricted should never appear in the German market, including the ones we add next month." That is a standing rule rather than a setting, and it is the sort of thing worth having when the cost of one mistake is a regulator rather than a refund.

Two things to say plainly. The redirect is Shopify's own behaviour, so what we build sits before it: the rule's job is to make sure the exclusion is made in time, not to change what the exclusion does. And you can have this either way round. The lighter version is a rule that catches the product the moment it is created carrying your restricted marker and tells you at once, so the click is one you know to make rather than one nobody remembers — be exact about what that buys you, though: a product created live has been live for the time it took you to read the message, so create restricted products as drafts and the message arrives first. The full version is ours end to end — say so and a product carrying your marker stops reaching shoppers in that country, including the ones you add next month. A person here takes that on straight away and has it working in your store within 24 hours. It asks your store to approve one more Shopify permission on the way, which the app asks for in plain language at the moment you switch the rule on rather than at install.

Shopivibe solves the problem in your store and keeps what it adds maintained, including when Shopify changes something underneath. Shopivibe is free during early access, with 3,500 credits included. Credits beyond the included 3,500 cost $0.06 each.

Know what must not be sold where? Describe the rule in your own words →