About Region Lock
Region Lock is a Shopify app for stores that sell through Shopify Markets from more than one warehouse: one in the US, one in Europe, one in Australia, each serving its own market. Shopify prices and routes those markets well, but it shows every buyer one number for availability: the total across all your locations. A buyer in Berlin can buy a book your EU warehouse ran out of weeks ago, and nobody finds out it is shipping from Nevada until the tracking email.
Region Lock makes regional stock visible, and makes buying across regions a choice instead of an accident.
The problem it solves
Inventory in Shopify is held per location, but storefront availability is the sum. Markets decides what a buyer pays and order routing decides which warehouse ships, yet nothing between them tells the buyer “your region is out”. The result is orders that ship across an ocean at your expense, surprise delivery times, and customs charges nobody agreed to.
The usual workaround is duplicate regional products, a “(EU)” and an “(AUS)” copy of everything, which splits your reviews, your SEO and your reporting, and triples the catalogue you maintain. Region Lock exists so you can keep one product per thing you sell.
What it does
- Keeps per-region stock on every variant. You map each location to a region once. The app then keeps metafields on every variant equal to the stock at that region’s locations: a full backfill on demand, then live updates from Shopify’s inventory webhooks.
- Gates the buy button, politely. A theme block disables Add to Cart with “Out of stock in your region” when the buyer’s market has none, and offers an explicit “order anyway, ships from another region” button beneath it. The buyer who clicks it has consented; the line is tagged so you can see it on the order.
- Shows region-true availability. A second block replaces the theme’s stock widget with the buyer’s own region’s number, not the global total.
- Enforces at checkout if you want it to. In hard mode, a Shopify Function blocks checkout of a gated line that lacks the consent tag, catching express checkouts and shared cart links that never saw the product page. Soft mode keeps it a UI-only nudge. Off is off.
What it deliberately does not do
The app never writes your inventory, never moves stock, and never changes prices or routing. It reads inventory and mirrors it into metafields your storefront can see; the only things it writes to your store are those metafields and its own configuration. If you uninstall it, your products simply stop being gated.
Who it is for
Stores on any Shopify plan that sell internationally from regional warehouses and want one catalogue, honest availability per market, and cross-region orders to be deliberate. It was built by a publisher running exactly that setup: US, EU and Australian warehouses behind one storefront.