Local delivery is the best thing a lot of small shops offer. You control the timing, the handling and the handover, and it is the one part of fulfilment that never gets lost in a depot.
It is also the easiest thing to accidentally sell to someone forty minutes away.
Once an out-of-area customer has booked and paid for a delivery you cannot make, every option is bad: drive it anyway and lose the margin, refund and disappoint, or spend the afternoon on the phone rearranging. The fix is to make sure the option was never offered.
How far Shopify's own local delivery gets you
Genuinely quite far, and it is worth using:
- It creates the delivery method, ties it to a location, and prices it.
- It defines a delivery area — either a radius around that location, or a list of postcodes.
If your coverage is a tidy circle around one shop, that is the whole job. Use it, skip the rest of this, and go and do something else.
Where it runs out
The native area is a circle or a per-location list, and real delivery rounds are usually neither:
- Coverage follows roads, not radius. A village eight kilometres away up a fast road is easy; one four kilometres away across a river with no bridge is not. A radius takes the wrong one.
- A few outliers you serve anyway. Three postcodes technically outside the circle that happen to sit on the driver's existing route.
- Areas that vary. You go north on Tuesdays and south on Fridays, and the round is not one shape.
- A list that is fiddly to maintain per location. Especially once more than one location is involved and the areas overlap.
None of these mean the native setting is wrong — they mean your coverage is a shape it cannot draw.
The fix: hide the local rate outside your postcodes
A checkout rule can hide a shipping option based on the delivery address:
Hide Local delivery when the postcode is not one of
2000,2010,201*,2060...2069.
An address inside the list sees local delivery as normal. Anything outside simply does not — the option is absent, not greyed out with an explanation, which is what you want, because an option a customer can see but not use is an email waiting to happen.
The list takes the shapes a real area needs:
- Individual postcodes —
2000,2010. - Wildcards —
201*covers everything starting201, for a whole district in one line. - Ranges —
2060...2069covers both ends and everything between.
You can mix all three, so "most of one district plus four specific outliers on the route" is a short list rather than a hundred lines.
It is one condition, so it is a simple rule — you do not need to combine anything to express it.
The failure worth guarding against
The mistake that costs you is an over-broad wildcard. Nothing errors, nothing looks wrong, and the rule works perfectly for every address you tested — while quietly offering the van to a district you cannot reach. You find out from a customer.
So write the list the way your area is actually shaped rather than the way it is quickest to type, and check both directions before it goes live:
- Preview with an address inside your area. The local rate should appear.
- Preview with one outside. It should be gone.
Testing only the inside case is the trap: a list with a typo usually still works for the postcodes you thought of.
If you would rather see real evidence than test addresses, run it in monitor mode first. The rule records what it would have done to your actual incoming orders, changing nothing at checkout, so you can see whether real customers are landing inside or outside your list before you commit.
One thing to check first
If local delivery is the only shipping option you offer, hiding it for an out-of-area address would leave that checkout with no way to receive the order at all. The rule refuses to do that — every option stays visible rather than stranding the customer — but the real fix is to offer a postal rate alongside it, so there is something for the people you cannot drive to.
In short
Shopify's local delivery is the right tool for creating and pricing the rate, and a radius is the right tool when your coverage is a circle. When it is not — when the round follows roads, skips a river, or picks up a few streets on the way — a checkout rule expresses the real shape: hide the local option for any address outside the postcodes you genuinely serve, and nobody books a van you cannot send.