Understand countries and regions

Commerce uses countries and their associated regions in a number of places on your storefront, in the administration interface, and in the REST APIs.

For example, a shopper’s shipping-address country specifies the country where their purchases are shipped. Countries and regions you add with the Admin API /ccadmin/v1/countries/: endpoints are available in all areas of your Commerce instance.

You can use Commerce settings and widgets to narrow the list of countries used by . For example:

• You can create shipping methods that allow shoppers to have their purchases shipped only to the contiguous 48 states, even when all 50 states and Armed Forces PO Boxes are available in your Commerce instance
• You can narrow the available list of billing countries for a country store so that only shoppers whose billing addresses are in specific countries can purchase items from the store.

If you Commerce instance supports multiple sites, the list of countries is available to all sites. See Configure Sites for more information about multiple sites.

Each country and region you add to Commerce must match a valid ISO 3166 code. For details about ISO 3166, codes, visit the International Standards for Organization website at https://www.iso.org.

The following table describes the properties that are part of requests and responses to the /ccadmin/v1/countries/: endpoints.

Property	Description
countryCode	A valid ISO 3166 country code. For example, AR is the country code for Argentina.
regionCode	A valid ISO 3166 subdivision code. For example, AR-B is the code for Buenos Aires.
abbreviation	The second part of a regionCode. For example, abbreviation for Buenos Aires is B
displayName	A string that identifies a country or region on the storefront and in the administration interface.