There are two different ideas of location, and they don't always match:
Selected market / country — usually what you want. This is the country tied to the market and currency your customer is browsing in. Shopify uses it by default, shoppers can switch it with a country or currency selector, and it's the right choice for the large majority of customizations: market-specific banners, currency- and pricing-based messages, country-specific add-ons and offers, reward tiers, and so on. EliteCart already supports this in those settings.
Physical (actual) location — for legal and compliance cases. Sometimes you need to know where a customer physically is — for example, whether they're actually in the European Union — regardless of the market they've selected. A shopper can switch their market to see another currency, but that doesn't change where they really are. When a rule depends on the customer's real-world location, you'll want to target by physical location instead.
Example: a visitor physically in Germany switches your store to the United States market to see prices in USD. Their selected country is now the US, but they're physically still in the EU. For currency and offers, the selected market is the right basis. For an EU legal requirement, you want their physical location.
These are the situations where merchants reach for true geolocation rather than the selected market. People often search for these by their legal names:
EU right of withdrawal / cooling-off period (in German, Widerrufsrecht) — for example the acknowledgment checkbox for digital products, shown only to shoppers physically in the EU.
Age-restricted / age-gated products — alcohol, vaping, and similar, where what's permitted depends on where the buyer actually is.
Region- or country-restricted products — items you can only sell into (or must not sell into) certain countries, due to licensing, distribution, export or sanctions restrictions.
Geo-blocking / geo-restriction / geo-targeting — showing, hiding, or labelling content, notices, or legal disclaimers based on a customer's real location.
In all of these, basing the decision on physical location — rather than a market the shopper can switch — makes the behaviour much harder to bypass.
Either way — selected market or physical location — location can be used to show or hide almost anything in the cart for specific countries or regions, such as:
banners and announcements,
messages, notices, or legal disclaimers,
checkboxes (such as a compliance acknowledgment),
add-ons and offers,
whole sections or custom content.
Physical-location targeting is a tailored setup. Market-based targeting is already available in the relevant settings (banners, add-ons, rewards). Targeting by a customer's physical location is configured for you by the EliteCart team — just tell us what should be shown or hidden, and for which countries or regions.
Location detection is best-effort. It's accurate for the large majority of shoppers, but no method is perfect — tools like VPNs or proxies can make someone appear to be somewhere they're not. For most show-and-hide use cases that's perfectly fine; for strict regulatory requirements, treat it as a strong signal rather than absolute proof, and confirm your obligations with your own legal advisor.
Reach out via the in-app chat or email support, let us know what you'd like to show or hide and for which countries or regions, and we'll take care of it./cal
