How to Sell Vape Products with WooCommerce – Complete Guide

Welcome 🙂 This is a complete guide on how to sell Vape with WooCommerce, respecting the legal restrictions of countries, provinces and states.

Vaping is an industry that is growing a lot in the last months, and we believe it represents a great opportunity for online business. In short, Vaping is an electronic cigarette industry (e-cigarettes) with different flavors and aromas. You can find e-cigarettes with tobacco or without tobacco.

Unfortunately, the Vaping industry goes through some inconveniences due to certain legal restrictions that are imposed on it in different countries, provinces or states.

It is important to clarify that here we are not going to discuss the health effects of Vaping since we have enough information about that on Google. Rather, we will use that important information, along with the legal information to be able to build a WooCommerce store that has no legal problems at all when selling vape or e-cigarettes online to different countries, states, or provinces.

Before making your vape shop with WooCommerce

Before following this guide on how to sell Vaping with WooCommerce respecting the legal restrictions of countries, provinces or states, it is important that you have taken the following steps:

1. Obtain your permission to sell vape products, according to the laws of your country
2. Get your EIN number (If you are from the United States)
3. Research the legal restrictions of the countries, provinces or states where you will sell your products
4. Create your website and your WooCommerce store with WordPress
5. Add the products you will sell, using clear categories such as “With tobacco” and “Without tobacco“. This is important for the restrictions that we will apply later.

Once you complete those steps, you can now follow the steps in this guide to sell your e-cigarettes with WooCommerce:

Step 1. Install the “Country Catalogs for WooCommerce” plugin

With the Country Catalogs for WooCommerce plugin, you can create different product catalogs for each continent, country, state, or province. You can completely hide the WooCommerce products in the catalog for a certain country, hide only the prices of the products, or show different prices and products.

These are the restrictions you can apply to your products:

• Products by continent/country/state/province
• Variations by continent/country/state/province
• Categories by continent/country/state/province
• WooCommerce coupons by continent/country/state/province

Step 2. Sell Vape with WooCommerce

You better than anyone else know the restrictions that you should apply to your products, depending on the laws of your country or state. However, here we show you some of the general options that most people need when using the Country Catalogs for WooCommerce plugin.

Option 1. Restrict all your products by country

The first thing we can do with the Country Catalogs for WooCommerce plugin is to apply restrictions to products per country. For example, if vape products were completely restricted in the United States but allowed in Mexico, you can have your products sold in Mexico only.

To restrict all your products by country, you need to open the General Settings of the plugin.

Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Country Restrictions.

Once there, you need to select these values in the General tab:

• Geolocation Method: Shipping country/state on checkout
• Fallback geolocation method: Shipping country/state on checkout (optional)
• What happens when the user location is unknown: Show all products (optional)
• Restriction method: Show product in catalog, disable add to cart, show prices
• Restrict by: Country and continents
• Save the changes.

Once you set the general settings, go to the Products per country tab and select the following values:

• Select country: Enter the countries where you want to NOT SELL the products
• Sell in selected countries/states: No
• Save the changes.

Once you set these values on the country restrictions settings, the users from the selected countries won’t be able to buy the products because they will be restricted for their shipping country.

Option 2. Restrict all your products by state or province

Sometimes, big countries like the United States, impose restrictions on some states or provinces only. Let’s suppose e-cigarettes are prohibited in Washington and New York. In this case, we need to sell to all states but Washington and New York.

To restrict all your products by state or province, go to WooCommerce > Settings > Country Restrictions.

Once there, go to the General tab and select the following values:

• Geolocation Method: Show country/state selector in the header
• Fallback geolocation method: Shipping country/state on checkout
• What happens when the user location is unknown: Show all products (optional)
• Restriction method: Show product in catalog, disable add to cart, show prices
• Restrict by: States or provinces of one country
• Save the changes.

Once you select the General settings, you need to select the Header selector settings.

• Dropdown selector: Default country/state: Select the default state you want to display on the header selector
• Dropdown selector: How to display the selected country: You can select to show the current flag only or both the flag and the country name
• Dropdown selector: Display a popup asking the user to select a country: Enable this option to display a popup once when they visit the website so they select the country before viewing the website. This is very useful so they always see the products according to their selected state
• Popup selector: Display a message in the header of the popup: Leave empty to not display any intro message and only display a title and the list of countries/states. You can add a message here saying “Please select your state so we can show you the products allowed for your state”
• Sync the dropdown selector with the shipping information? Yes. This is an additional security measure to avoid users selecting a valid state on the popup and then trying to ship products to invalid states. This way, when they change the shipping country during checkout, we will reapply the restrictions.

Once you set the header selector settings for state/province restriction, you need to select the product settings. Go to the Products per country tab and select these values:

• Select country: Enter the states where you want to restrict vaping products.
• Sell in selected countries/states: No

After setting these values on the country restriction settings, users from the selected states won’t be able to buy the vape products from your store.

Here we show you the result:

This is how the popup to select the countries or states appears the first time a user visits your site:

When they select a country or state, the product catalog will show the right products and prices. This is how the states’ selector will look in the header. Users will be able to select their own state:

When the users are from a state where your products are restricted, you can configure in our settings page what happens. We can hide the product completely like it doesn’t exist, or we can show the product but hide prices and disable add to cart. In this case, we selected to show the product without add-to-cart, so they won’t be able to use the Add to Cart button. They will just see the Read More button.

Option 3. Restrict specific categories like “Nicotine” for countries or states

In some countries or states, governments can restrict nicotine e-cigarettes only. In that case, you can sell all the e-cigarretes without nicotine for those countries or states, so you only need to restrict the ones with nicotine.

For this, it’s important to create WooCommerce product categories with names like “Nicotine” and “No Nicotine“.

The Country Catalogs for WooCommerce plugin allows you to restrict entire product categories for countries or states. You just need to follow these simple steps:

First, if you already configured the general restriction settings, you can skip this step. If you haven’t, you can go to WooCommerce > Settings > Country Restrictions and select the general settings:

• Geolocation Method: Shipping country/state on checkout
• Fallback geolocation method: Shipping country/state on checkout (optional)
• What happens when the user location is unknown: Show all products (optional)
• Restriction method: Show product in catalog, disable add to cart, show prices
• Restrict by:
  • For countries: States or provinces of one country
  • For states and provinces: States or provinces of one country
• Save the changes.

After that, go to the Category pages per country tab. Once there, the plugin will ask you to Go to the list of categories because you need to edit the categories individually. But don’t worry because it’s really simple!

As you can see in the image below, we’ve created two categories to classify the vape products:

• Nicotine
• No Nicotine

In this example, we’ll restrict the Nicotine category from selected countries or states.

Once you open the category that you’ll restrict, go to the Country restrictions section and select the following values:

• Select countries: This will depend on what you selected in the Restrict by field on the general settings. In this case, it shows states from the United States because we selected States or provinces from one country.
• Available in selected countries: No.
• Apply this to: Category and products. This will hide the category page and also the individual products that belong to this category.
• Save the changes.

Once you’ve applied these changes, the Nicotine category products won’t be sold on your WooCommerce store for the selected countries or states.

They will be able to buy only the products that have no nicotine. The products with Nicotine don’t show the Add to cart button.

This is how a restricted product page will look: It won’t show the Add to cart button and it’ll show a message indicating the product isn’t allowed for the user country/state.

Option 4. How to avoid selling Vaping products to minors

Another option we want to mention is to avoid selling vape products to minors. For this, you need two plugins:

• Checkout Manager for WooCommerce
• Conditional Payment Methods

You can use Checkout Manager for WooCommerce to create an “Age” field for the checkout form.

Once you add it, you can restrict all payment methods for users under a certain age using the conditional payment methods plugin. This way, when they select a disallowed age, all the payment methods will be disabled and they won’t be able to complete the order.

• Read: WooCommerce – Hide Payment Gateways Based on User Age

Make a WooCommerce vape shop easily!

There are few things as satisfying as running your business without legal problems that will eventually cost you large amounts of money.

We are sure that the Vaping industry will continue to grow, and we want you to be ready to sell your vaping products with WooCommerce without legal problems.

It is also very important to mention that you can apply these and other restrictions on your products. Visit our blog to find more ways to manage your country restrictions with Country Catalogs for WooCommerce.