With the Smartstore Geo-Blocker plugin, you can determine who can and cannot access your store. You have the option of restricting access by country, IP address blocks or individual IP addresses.
One use case is the prevention of traffic caused by hackers and bots. Many store administrators then resort to blocking countries in Smartstore by IP to protect their site and their visitors from harm. In this blog post, we will introduce you to the different ways you can implement geo-blocking on your Smartstore store.
What does geoblocking in Smartstore mean?
To begin with, let's find out a little about what geoblocking in Smartstore is exactly. If you've heard the term before, it essentially means that you can block visitors - or traffic - from a specific country from accessing your store.
Blocking by country is based on IP addresses, which are individual identifiers for devices. Countries often have ranges of IP addresses. If you want to block China, for example, you need this range of IP addresses.
Store operators and administrators often see geoblocking as a solution to a bot problem. However, each admin identifies the source of bot traffic depending on their own offering. There are different opinions, but you will find some recurring ones like Russia and China on everyone's list.
How do I find out which countries or IP address blocks should be blocked in Smartstore?
If the spammer has registered as a customer, the IP address of their last login will be stored in their customer account. When it comes to general calls, the web server log files are a good source. Even if you only want to or are only allowed to operate in certain countries, the Smartstore Geoblocker will serve you well.
Also use Google Analytics
In your Google Analytics dashboard, navigate to Sessions by Country > Location Overview to see details about your users. Here you can see a visual representation of your global traffic.
Google Analytics only shows where the traffic is coming from, but not the type of traffic you are receiving. Based on the content of your offer and your target group profile, you can determine whether traffic from a country is harming your store.
How do I block country IP addresses from accessing my store?
There are two ways to implement geo-blocking for your store: manually or with the Smartstore GeoBlocker plugin. The manual method is tedious and time-consuming. We strongly recommend that you use the plugin method to block country IP addresses for your Smartstore store.
The Smartstore GeoBlocker plugin allows you to block country IP addresses directly from your Smartstore dashboard with just a few clicks. The big advantage at this point is that you can access the other diagnostic tools such as login and traffic logs to determine which countries need to be blocked.
If a connection is denied, the visitor is redirected to 404 (page not found). IP addresses are weighted higher by the system than countries. This means that a permitted IP from a blocked country can establish a connection, but a blocked IP from a permitted country cannot.
What other functions does the Smartstore GeoBlocker plugin offer you?
- Decide between opt-in or opt-out as a procedure
- Trust already registered users without further verification
- Select restricted/allowed countries from the drop-down list
- Define IPv4 address ranges with wildcard placeholders
- Use '*' for any number '?' for a number or number ranges (1-255) to define IPv4 blocks
Attention: The Geo-blocking Regulation came into force in the European Union (EU) on December 3, 2018. Read a blog post from trustedshops.de on the topic of geo-blocking.
In the Trustedshops blog, the experts from Trusted Shops GmbH inform you about current topics relating to e-commerce, e-commerce law and online marketing. Trusted Shops GmbH is a partner of Smartstore AG.
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