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first published week of: 03/02/2015
One of the best things about having an online business is that you can reach customers all over the world. Of course this creates unique complications, as users in different countries and regions have specific needs, and are subject to different laws. For eCommerce sites, knowledge of your site’s visitors is especially important for calculating tax rates. In addition, it’s also important to consider if you are selling something that could be illegal in certain regions.
For this, geolocation awareness — i.e., the ability to programmatically be aware of a visitor’s location, by country, region, or even longitude and latitude — can play a huge role. It is most commonly done using the GeoIP database by Maxmind, a free database used to translate an IP address into location data.
There are several WordPress plugins that incorporate this database to do interesting things. For example, there’s a plugin to automatically switch to a translated version of the site if one is available via WPML, based on a user’s region. There is even a WooCommerce extension for setting different prices based on the visitor’s location.
GeoIP is a very useful technology for all sorts of applications. Calculating sales tax based on location has become more important due to changes in VAT laws in the EU. Other applications include showing location-specific ads, and blocking sales of certain products in specific markets. continued…