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Send a country's shoppers to your distributor's site

By Beacon Wave Studio · October 2, 2026 · 7 min read

Most geolocation guides assume every country you sell to is a market on your own store. Plenty of brands do not work that way. A Spanish footwear label has an importer in Japan who holds stock, runs a Japanese-language site and has a contract saying they are the only seller there. A supplement company has a distributor in Australia because the registration is in the distributor's name. For those brands, a shopper in Tokyo landing on the Spanish store is not an opportunity. It is a channel conflict waiting to become an angry email, or an order that cannot legally ship.

The usual responses are to ignore it or to block the country. There is a better third option: detect the country and offer the shopper the distributor's site. This post covers how to set that up with GeoBeacon, what to write in the popup, how to keep ad tracking intact, and the SEO and legal details that differ from a redirect between your own markets.

Why blocking is the wrong tool here

Blocking makes sense when you do not want the order at all, which is the fraud case we covered in the country-blocking post. A distributor arrangement is the opposite situation. You want the sale; you just want it to go through the partner. A wall that says "we don't ship to Japan" loses the sale for both of you, and the shopper leaves with the impression that the brand does not sell in their country, which is false.

Shopify's own tooling does not help much. Markets let you decide where you sell and at what price (Shopify Markets), but a country your distributor covers is usually a country you deliberately do not add as a market, which means the storefront treats it like any other unsupported location: products show in your base currency, checkout refuses the shipping address, and nobody mentions the partner who could have shipped it that afternoon.

Setting up a URL rule

A GeoBeacon rule has two halves: which visitors it applies to, and where to send them. The destination can be one of your Shopify markets or, under "Send them to", Another website or store (URL). Pick that, paste the distributor's address, and the rule becomes an external redirect.

1. Under Visitors from, choose the country or countries the distributor covers. One rule per partner keeps the list readable.
2. Set the destination URL. It must start with https://, and it should be the page on the distributor's site that sells your brand, not their home page. A shopper who clicked an ad for your trail runner should land somewhere trail runners are visible.
3. Decide on Keep the current page path. When ticked, GeoBeacon appends the path and query string of the page the shopper is on, so /products/trail-runner on your store becomes /products/trail-runner on theirs. That is only useful if the distributor runs a Shopify store with the same handles, which happens more often than you would think when they import your catalog. If their URLs differ, leave it off and point the URL at your brand page.
4. Fill in Store name shown in the popup. Without it the popup shows the destination's hostname. "Kaze Trading, our official Japan store" reads a great deal better than "kaze-trading.jp".

Two details worth knowing. If the shopper is already on the destination host, GeoBeacon does nothing, so a distributor who also installs the app pointing back at you cannot create a loop between the two sites. And the rule only fires for detected countries; if Shopify's edge cannot tell where the visitor is, the page is left alone rather than guessed at.

Popup, not automatic redirect

GeoBeacon can redirect silently or show a popup first. For a market switch on your own store, either can be defended. For an external site, use the popup. You do not control the distributor's site, so you cannot promise the product is in stock there, and a silent redirect that lands on a 404 is worse than no redirect. Travellers and expats are also more common than merchants expect: a Japanese customer visiting Barcelona who wants to pick the shoes up from your flagship store should be able to click "stay".

The copy rules from our popup copy post apply, with one addition: say who the partner is and why they exist. A working example for the Japan case:

• Title: Shopping from Japan?
• Body: Kaze Trading is our official store for Japan, with stock in Osaka, prices in yen and no import duties on delivery.
• Accept button: Go to Kaze Trading
• Decline button: Stay here (ships from Spain, duties may apply)

The decline button is doing honest work there. Duties are the thing shoppers get surprised by, and a sentence that mentions them is both a nudge toward the partner and a disclosure you would want anyway. Set the remember period so a shopper who declines is not asked again on every page; thirty days is a reasonable default.

Ads, attribution and the path you pass along

If you run ads in the distributor's country, agree with them on where the traffic should go before you set the rule up. The clean arrangement is that your ads link directly to their site and they report back. The messy but common one is that you run brand campaigns globally and the redirect is the hand-off. In that case tick Keep the current page path, because the query string travels with it: utm_source, utm_campaign and gclid all arrive on the distributor's site intact, and their analytics will attribute the visit correctly. The one parameter GeoBeacon strips is its own test override, so a ?geobeacon=JP you used to test does not leak into their reports. We went deeper on parameter handling in the Google Ads post.

What changes for SEO

Nothing, as long as the redirect stays in the browser. GeoBeacon runs after the page has rendered, asks Shopify's edge for the visitor's country, and skips known crawlers entirely, so Googlebot sees the same page a Spanish customer sees. Your product pages keep ranking in Japan; it is only the human who arrives from the result who is offered the switch. The approach to avoid is anything server-side: a redirect at the edge that bounces Japanese IPs to another domain can make Google treat your pages as unavailable in that country. The reasoning is in the SEO-safe redirects post.

The distributor benefits too. If they sell only your brand, a link from the official site is the strongest signal they will get. If their site is a multi-brand retailer, deep-link to the brand page rather than the home page, for the shopper's sake as much as for ranking.

Europe and the geo-blocking rule

If the distributor covers an EU country and your store sells elsewhere in the EU, the Geo-blocking Regulation applies: you may not redirect a customer to a different version of a site because of their nationality or location without their explicit consent, and they must be able to reach the version they wanted. A popup with a genuine stay button satisfies that; an automatic redirect does not. Details and the exceptions are in our EU geo-blocking post. Outside the EU there is no equivalent rule we are aware of, but the popup is still the better experience for the reasons above.

Testing without flying to Tokyo

Append ?geobeacon=JP to any page of your store and GeoBeacon behaves as if the edge had reported Japan, including for the external rule. Check that the popup names the partner, that the accept button lands on the right page, and that the path and query string appear on their site if you enabled them. Then test from a country with no rule to confirm nothing shows. The override is for your own testing; ordinary shoppers never see it, and the parameter is removed before the hand-off.

Distributor agreements tend to be written by lawyers and implemented by nobody, which is how a brand ends up quietly competing with its own partner on price. A single rule fixes that for the storefront. GeoBeacon is free to install, and the rule takes about as long to set up as reading this post did.