Managing Countries and States/Provinces

In ProductCart every drop-down menu that lists states and countries both in the storefront and in the Control Panel is database driven. ProductCart's database includes a table for Countries and a table for States. Use the Manage Countries and Manage States features to add/edit/remove items to/from those tables, and to establish a relationship between them.

When there are states or provinces associated with a country, the State/Province field becomes a drop-down that shows a list of those states/provinces. A selection is required. By default, ProductCart includes state/provinces for the Unites States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

For example, the screen shot below shows a customer from Canada registering on the store. As the customer selects Canada from the Country drop-down, the Province field changes automatically to show Canadian provinces.

When there are no states or provinces associated with a country, the State/Province field becomes an input field, and is not required. Since an input field can lead to user errors, whenever possible we recommend that you enter the states/provinces associated with your default country (and the countries your customers most commonly purchase from).

A simple way to prevent users to place an order from countries that you cannot or do not want to sell into is to remove them from the list of supported countries. For example, if you store is located in the United States and you only ship to customers in the US and Canada, you can remove all other countries from the list.

Using the right state and country codes is very important if your store uses dynamic shipping providers (e.g. FedEx, UPS, etc.). Therefore, note the following:

• If you are re-entering a US state that you had previously deleted, make sure to use the official abbreviations. The following is a link to a Web page on the United States Postal Service’s Web site that may be helpful:
  http://www.usps.com/ncsc/lookups/abbreviations.html#states
• Similarly, if you are re-entering a Canadian province that you had previously deleted, make sure to use the official abbreviations. The following is a link to a Web page that may be helpful:
  http://canadaonline.about.com/library/bl/blpabb.htm
• If you are entering or re-entering a country, the following is a link to a Web page that may be helpful:
  http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/prods-services/iso3166ma/02iso-3166-code-lists/list-en1.html

To restore the original settings, click on the Restore Default Settings button on both the Manage States and Manage Countries pages. This feature adds back to the list all states and countries that were originally included. This can be very useful if you only sell your products locally, but then decide to also sell them internationally: you won’t have to manually re-add all the country codes.