A shopper asks "do you ship to the Philippines?" and sometimes gets an immediate yes, and sometimes gets asked which region they're in first. That difference can look inconsistent from the outside. It isn't. It's driven entirely by whether your own shipping setup actually draws a line partway through that country, and it exists specifically to prevent a wrong, overconfident "yes."

When a shopper names only a country, without naming a specific state, province, or region inside it, Arbyn checks whether your coverage there is complete or partial. If it's complete, meaning every region of that country is enabled in your shipping zone, Arbyn confirms it directly, no follow-up needed. If it's partial, meaning your coverage stops at specific regions and the shopper's exact location is unknown, Arbyn asks a short follow-up, which region they're in, before giving a final answer.

This is default behaviour with nothing to configure. It applies the same way in chat and by email. If you want to see for yourself which of your countries have complete versus partial coverage, open Knowledge, then Catalog, then Shipping, choose your profile, and select View zones & rates. A country with no region breakdown listed is fully covered. A country showing a region count, like "74 regions only", is where the follow-up question can happen.

The problem this solves happened on a real store. A merchant's Philippines shipping zone covered 74 of the country's 82 regions, with a handful, including one called Tawi-Tawi, deliberately switched off. Before this behaviour existed, Arbyn had access only to a single label for the whole country, something like "Domestic [Philippines]", with no detail about which specific regions were actually included. A customer asked "do you ship to Tawi-Tawi in the Philippines?" and got told yes, because that was the only answer the data available at the time supported. It wasn't a fabrication, it was an honest answer built from an incomplete picture. It was also wrong, because Tawi-Tawi genuinely wasn't covered.

The fix wasn't to hide the detail, it was to use it, and to ask when the detail matters and hasn't been given. Arbyn now reads the exact region list for every country in every zone. When a shopper names a specific region, that solves the problem directly: Arbyn checks the exact place they said against the exact list you configured, and answers correctly either way. The harder case is when a shopper names only the country. For a fully-covered country, there's genuinely nothing to ask, since every region is included, so the country name alone is enough to answer. For a partially-covered country, the shopper's actual location is a real unknown, one that could just as easily be Cebu (in the 74) or Tawi-Tawi (not in the 74), and a cheerful "yes" would be a coin flip dressed up as confidence.

Asking is the honest alternative to guessing, not a failure to answer. The instruction Arbyn works from is direct: if a customer names only the country and coverage there is limited to specific regions, don't promise delivery to an address that hasn't actually been confirmed, ask which region they're in, then give a definite answer. That's a deliberate design choice, not a fallback for missing data; the data exists, the follow-up exists because the data alone genuinely isn't enough to answer correctly yet.

This is scoped narrowly, so it only fires where it's actually needed. A shopper asking about a country you ship to entirely never sees a follow-up question about their region, because there's nothing ambiguous to resolve. The follow-up is reserved for exactly the case where your own settings have created a genuine gap inside a country, which, across most stores, is a minority of the countries they ship to, not the default experience.

Once the shopper answers, the conversation doesn't restart. Arbyn checks the named region against the list and gives a final, definite answer in the same reply, along with the cost and any conditions that apply, the same as it would have if the shopper had named the region from the start.

Why did a shopper asking about my country get a direct yes, while another shopper asking about a different country got asked a follow-up? Because your coverage in the first country is complete, every region enabled, and your coverage in the second is limited to specific regions. Arbyn checks this per country, using your real settings.

Can I turn off the follow-up question and have Arbyn just say yes to any country I partially cover? No, and this is deliberate. Answering yes to a country you only partially cover, without knowing the shopper's exact region, is the exact failure mode this behaviour exists to prevent, so it isn't configurable to skip.

A shopper found the follow-up annoying. Is there a way around it for them? Naming their specific region up front, rather than just the country, skips the follow-up entirely, since Arbyn can check a named region immediately. If this comes up often, it may be worth mentioning in your written shipping information that customers can name their state or province directly for a faster answer.

Does this apply to shipping cost too, or only to whether delivery is possible at all? Both. If a country's coverage is region-limited, the cost itself can also depend on exactly which region a shopper is in, so the follow-up serves both purposes: confirming coverage and quoting the correct rate for that specific region.

What happens if a shopper refuses to say which region they're in? Arbyn won't promise delivery to an address it can't confirm. It will explain that coverage in that country depends on the specific region, and that it needs that detail to give an accurate answer, rather than defaulting to either a hopeful yes or an unhelpful no.