Show a payment method only for certain countries in Shopify checkout

In short

Shopify treats manual payment methods like bank transfer or cash on delivery as “on” or “off” for the whole store — every shipping country the same. There’s no built-in condition for “domestic only” or “not for international orders”, and even Shopify’s own Checkout Blocks list this as a Plus-only feature. The fix is a payment customization: a rule that checks the customer’s shipping country and hides the payment method for every other case. These rules run as a Shopify Function directly at checkout — on any plan, but only through an app from the App Store.

The problem, in merchants’ words

Merchants keep asking variations of the same question in the Shopify Community: “How to change the payment method by country”, “How to allow only certain payment gateways in certain countries?”, “Different Payment Method for Different Customers Based on Geolocation”. The reason is usually practical: bank transfer is easy to reconcile for domestic orders but adds friction and fraud risk once it crosses a border, and cash on delivery is a service some couriers only offer within one country.

The native way in Shopify

Set up the manual payment method: Settings › Payments › “Manual payment methods”. Create bank transfer or cash on delivery with a name and payment instructions, then activate it.

That’s as far as the admin goes. Once the method is active, every customer sees it — no matter which country they’re shipping to. There’s no country field on an individual payment method.

The one native exception is local payment methods through Shopify Payments (Klarna, iDEAL, Bancontact and others): they show up automatically only for customers in eligible countries and currencies. That’s provider-side logic built into Shopify Payments, not something you can apply to your own manual methods.

Where Shopify stops

• Manual payment methods have no country condition. Active means visible to every customer, whichever country they’re shipping to.
• Shopify Markets doesn’t cover it. Markets controls language, currency, pricing and product availability per region — not which payment method appears at checkout. That’s a common source of disappointment in the Community.
• Shopify’s own fix is Plus-only. Checkout Blocks can hide payment methods by shipping destination or market, but only on the Shopify Plus plan.
• The usual workaround is a note in the payment description (“Domestic orders only”) — it informs the customer but doesn’t stop someone shipping abroad from selecting the method anyway.

How a payment rule solves it

The rule checks the customer’s country and hides the payment method for every other case:

Goal	Rule
Bank transfer for domestic orders only	customer’s country is not the home country → hide bank transfer
No cash on delivery once shipping abroad	customer’s country is not the home country → hide cash on delivery
Invoice only for a short list of countries	customer’s country is not in the allowed list → hide invoice

What the customer sees: checking out from the home country shows bank transfer as usual; checking out from abroad doesn’t show it at all — only the payment methods cleared for that country remain.

Technically the rule runs on Shopify’s Payment Customization Function: at checkout, Shopify passes the function the buyer’s localization country (localization.country.isoCode — the country the checkout is localized to), and the function responds with “hide”. That runs on Shopify’s own infrastructure, with no detour through third-party servers and no theme changes. Uninstall the app and checkout goes back to how it was.

Things to watch

• It’s the checkout’s localization country, not necessarily the billing address. The function reads localization.country.isoCode — the country the checkout is localized to — so check how that lines up if a customer’s billing country differs.
• Local payment methods stay independent. Klarna, iDEAL and similar keep following their own country logic through Shopify Payments; a payment rule only affects the methods you explicitly target.
• Limit: Shopify allows up to 25 active payment customizations per store, across all apps combined. This rule needs one.
• Combinable: The same mechanism works for any manual payment method — bank transfer, cash on delivery, invoice — and can be combined with other conditions like customer tag or cart total.