This is the single detail that decides whether Arbyn gives a shopper a correct, confident yes, or a wrong one. It's worth understanding on its own, separately from zones and rates in general, because getting it backwards is exactly how a real store once told a real customer "yes" to a region it didn't actually ship to.

Inside a shipping zone, a country can be listed two different ways. Most of the time, a country is listed with no region breakdown at all, which means the entire country is covered, every state, province, or territory in it. Sometimes, though, a country carries a list of specific regions, things like states in the US, provinces in Canada, or regions in the Philippines, and when it does, that list is the complete set of what's covered. Shopify calls these regions "provinces" internally, regardless of what they're called locally (state, province, territory, department, prefecture), and Arbyn uses the same word to mean the same thing across every country.

There's nothing to configure specifically for this. Region coverage comes from how you set up your shipping zones in Shopify, under Settings, then Shipping and delivery. To see the exact list Arbyn reads, open Knowledge, then Catalog, then Shipping, pick a profile, choose View zones & rates, and expand any country that shows a region count next to it.

An empty region list means the whole country, not none of it. This is the part that's easy to get backwards, and it matters enough that it's worth stating plainly twice. Shopify's shipping zones list the regions that ARE included, never the ones that are excluded. So when a country in your zone has no region breakdown attached at all, that's not a gap in your data, it's Shopify's way of saying every region of that country is covered. Arbyn is built to read it that way. A country with a region list, on the other hand, is covered only in exactly those regions, and nowhere else in that country.

Real example, so this isn't abstract. A store shipping into the Philippines might have that country's zone list 74 named regions, provinces like Cebu, Davao del Sur, and Metro Manila. If a specific region, say Tawi-Tawi, isn't in that list, it means that region is switched off. A shopper asking "do you ship to Tawi-Tawi" gets told no, correctly, because that region genuinely isn't part of the coverage, even though the rest of the country is. A store's United States zone, by contrast, might list all fifty states plus DC, the territories, and military addressing codes, which reads as a long list but actually means the entire country is covered, since every possible region is present.

Arbyn reads the region's name, matched with its code. A region shows as, for example, "Cebu (PH-CEB)" or "Alabama (AL)", the readable name first because that's what a customer actually types, with the short code alongside it because a code disambiguates two regions that happen to share a name, and survives translation the same way a product SKU does. When a shopper writes in another language, or misspells a region slightly, the name is still what Arbyn is matching against, not the code.

Arbyn can't tell you what fraction of a country's regions are covered, only which ones are. The data it reads doesn't come with a total region count for a country attached to it, only the list of what's actually in the zone. So Arbyn will never say "you cover 74 of 82 regions", because it genuinely can't calculate that denominator from what it's given. What it can and does say is the complete, exact list of what's covered, and it treats anything not on that list as not covered. That's a deliberate, careful choice: guessing at a percentage it can't verify would be exactly the kind of overconfident answer this whole system exists to avoid.

A country in my zone shows no regions underneath it. Does that mean I ship to none of it? No, the opposite. An empty region list under a country means the entire country is covered. Shopify only lists the regions that are switched on, so nothing listed under a country is how "everywhere" is represented.

My US zone lists 62 entries. Does that mean I'm missing something? Probably not. That count usually includes all fifty states, DC, the territories, and a handful of military delivery codes, which together add up to genuinely full US coverage. A long region list isn't automatically partial coverage, it can just be how a fully covered country happens to be represented.

Can Arbyn tell me what percentage of a country's regions I actually cover? No, and it won't guess. The shipping data it reads doesn't include a total region count for a country, only the list of what's actually included in your zone. Arbyn states only what it can verify: which regions are covered and which aren't in the list at all.

Why does a region show a code next to its name, like "Alabama (AL)"? The code disambiguates regions that might share a name across countries, and it's stable across languages, the same way it is for the customer-facing name and code you're used to. Arbyn matches primarily on the name, since that's what a customer actually types, and keeps the code for accuracy.

I switched a region on in Shopify. How soon will Arbyn know? Within a few hours at most, since Arbyn's stored shipping summary refreshes roughly every three hours in the background. A live lookup mid-conversation reads your current settings directly, so that path reflects the change immediately.