Shipping rates not showing at checkout › One country or state

Shopify checkout diagnostics

Checkout won't ship to one country (or one state)

Orders come in from your home country. Buyers from one other country — or one state, or one province — cannot get through checkout. Your admin says you ship there. In Shopify, “I have a rate for that country” is one condition out of several, and each one lives on a different settings page.

“The only option shown is USA.”

That is how one merchant put it in the Shopify Community, with rates set up for Canada and the UK. The answer was not in the shipping settings at all.

Missing from the list, or present with no rates?

What the buyer sees	Look first at
The country is not in the checkout's country list, or the purchase cannot be completed	Markets: is the country in an active market? See below
The country is accepted, then “Shipping not available” or “no shipping rate is available for your region”	Zones and rates in the profile of the products in the cart
Only some products fail for that country	Those products' shipping profile
Some addresses in the country work, others do not	States or provinces selected in the zone; carrier-calculated rates. Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico

This is the earlier of the two failures: the buyer cannot even pick their country, so they never get as far as a shipping message, and you never see an abandoned checkout with a foreign address. Shopify's developer changelog put the rule plainly when it changed the Shipping and Markets settings in March 2023: “Buyers can only checkout if their country or region is in an active market.” The same post adds that a country must exist in a market before it can be added to a shipping zone, and Shopify's troubleshooting guide still says you can only add shipping and delivery settings when a country belongs to a market.

In other words, a shipping zone does not put a country on the list; Markets does. Two Community threads from 2022 show the symptom: one store's checkout offered only the United States although the UK and the EU had zones, another offered only some of the countries it had zones for. In the first, the reply was to activate the international market: “You will want to turn your international markets on for these countries to appear.” Check, in this order:

Settings → Markets: is the country in a market at all?
Is that market active? Buyers in an inactive market cannot complete a purchase, whatever its zones say.
Only then, the zones and rates. Once the country is on the list, a missing rate no longer hides it: the buyer picks it, types an address, and gets “Shipping not available” instead.

The causes, one by one

The country is not in an active market

To sell to a country, Shopify requires it to be in an active market. Customers in inactive markets cannot complete a purchase, even when their country is in a shipping zone with rates. A new market is also inactive by default if you do not already ship to all of its countries, so set up rates for every country first, then activate the market in Markets. This is the first thing to check when a whole country fails.

The product is not for sale there

A country can be in an active market and still not be able to buy one product. Then the cart gets no delivery option, and the message may even blame stock. Rule it out early — see “already sold out” but in stock.

No zone covers the address in this profile

A shipping zone is a group of countries or regions with the same rates. Buyers whose address falls outside your zones see a notice that no shipping rate is available for their region. Remember that zones belong to a profile: the General profile may cover Canada while a custom profile does not, and any cart containing that profile's products fails there. More on products in separate profiles.

The zone covers some states or provinces, not all

Zones are built from countries and regions. If a zone for the United States, Canada or Australia only selects some states or provinces, every address in the others is outside your zones. Within one profile and location group, a country or region can only belong to one zone, so look for the missing region in the other zones before adding it anywhere.

The rate's conditions do not match that country's carts

A zone with only a price-conditioned rate leaves carts outside its brackets with nothing, and that country's typical cart may differ from your home one. (Weight tiers fall back to the next highest weight-based rate, so they give odd prices rather than a block.) If you changed your store currency, Shopify advises recreating price-based rates, which keep the currency they were created in.

The carrier does not serve the address

Carrier-calculated rates need a rate from the carrier for the origin, the address and the box size. A zone that relies only on a carrier that does not deliver there offers nothing. Keep a flat rate for those countries, and backup rates for carrier failures.

Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico and other US territories

In Shopify's checkout address form, Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands are not countries. They are listed as regions of the United States, next to the states. A buyer in San Juan picks United States as the country, then Puerto Rico as the state; one merchant in the Community put it in capitals: “PUERTO RICO IS NOT IN THE COUNTRY OPTIONS”. That has four consequences for shipping:

One US zone means one price for all of them

A zone with every US region ticked charges the same rate to Honolulu, Anchorage and San Juan as to Ohio. To price them differently, untick them in your US zone and give them a zone of their own: within one profile and location group, a region can only belong to one zone.

A “lower 48” zone leaves them with nothing

The reverse is common too: a zone limited to the contiguous states, or built by unticking the territories, leaves every address in Hawaii, Alaska or Puerto Rico outside your zones. The buyer then gets “Shipping not available” — the message one merchant reported for a Hawaii address in a 2025 Community thread, puzzled because Hawaii is “in the 50 states”. If you do not want to ship there, that is the expected result; if you do, those regions need a zone with a rate.

Territories can appear at checkout even if you never added them

In two Community threads from June 2026, merchants selling only to the United States reported Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the checkout's state list although no zone or market included them; buyers who picked them got no shipping method. The replies agreed that there is no native setting to hide them: either give them a rate, or block them with a checkout validation function or app.

Carrier rates fail there first

Carriers treat addresses outside the contiguous states differently, and that is where live rates break. In October 2024, merchants in the Community quoted a Shopify Support reply saying that a change to the USPS rate card had “temporarily disabled USPS Ground Advantage label purchase and rates at checkout for domestic destinations outside the continental USA”. A flat rate for those regions, or backup rates, keeps checkout open when that happens.

On market-driven shipping

Stores moved to shipping options by market set their options on each market instead of in zones. A market can cover a country or specific states or provinces, and the upgrade can create such sub-region markets from your existing zones. When an address falls in several markets, checkout shows the options from all of them. After the upgrade, test one address per market you sell to — see what else can change.

What our store check covers, honestly

The free store check takes the countries your store says it ships to — up to eight, picked from the 25 we have test addresses for — and creates a cart for each, as an anonymous buyer from that country. It reports, per country, “Not for sale here” (a market or catalog problem), “No delivery option” (a zones or rates problem), or the options and prices the cart gets.

It uses one address per country, in a large city: New York for the US, Toronto for Canada, Sydney for Australia. A zone missing another state or province will not show up unless our address falls in it; in particular, it does not test Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico or the other US territories. It cannot see your admin, B2B buyers, or logged-in customers. Monitoring repeats the check every 6 hours and emails you when a country loses its delivery options.

Sources: Shopify Help Center, “Setting up shipping zones and rates”, “Setting up flat shipping rates”, “Troubleshooting and testing shipping rates”, “Set up markets”, “Understanding shipping options by market” and “Upgrading to shipping options by market”, checked 12 October 2026; “Troubleshooting and testing shipping rates”, checked again 17 October 2026. Shopify developer changelog, “Changes to Shipping and Markets settings” (7 March 2023), and the United States region list in Shopify's public address data (the service behind its address library), read 17 October 2026. Merchant reports from the Shopify Community: only the United States in the list, countries missing from the dropdown, Puerto Rico not accepted, Hawaii, territories at checkout and USPS Ground Advantage.