Determine user's country

[sccr410]

What is the easiest way to determine a user's country?

I want to add a feature to our e-commerce store that determines the user's country and provides the shipping cost. We only ship to the US/Canada with US getting a flat rate of $5.95 and Canada a flat rate of $15. So just figuring out the user's country we can display the correct flat rate shipping throughout their visit.

[Dan Grossman]

You need an IP-to-Location database, and need to keep it up to date as ISPs reallocate their IP space to different regions relatively often.

MaxMind provides a free version (GeoLite Country and GeoLite City) that's around 90% accurate.

Since they're never 100% accurate, and the user's current location isn't always where they want shipping to, you should still provide the ability for them to change the location you auto-detect.

[GOPalmer]

You could ask them.

You can also use a geoip database like http://www.maxmind.com/

Best Regards, George

[cloudtap]

This class can determining country of the network of a given IP address looking up a simple text database file.

It can also determine the path of an image file of the flag of a given country.

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2363.html

[felgall]

Note that when you do an IP lookup you are looking up the location of your visitor's ISP or proxy server. You are not able to tell where they are located themselves.

For example the ISP I use have their headquarters in Melbourne but provide internet across the whole of Australia - all Geo data for all their cusotmers regardless of where in Australia they are get reported as being in Melbourne.

[Dan Grossman]

Note that when you do an IP lookup you are looking up the location of your visitor's ISP or proxy server. You are not able to tell where they are located themselves.

For example the ISP I use have their headquarters in Melbourne but provide internet across the whole of Australia - all Geo data for all their cusotmers regardless of where in Australia they are get reported as being in Melbourne.

Actually, MaxMind says you are in Sydney.

http://www.maxmind.com/app/lookup_city

GeoIP databases track regional allocations of an ISP's IP space, not the location of the ISP.

They are more than 90% accurate to the city level -- that's accuracy in determining the true location of the user, not the ISP.

These databases would be worthless if your assumption were true (over 100 million American households would map to one of three cities of their ISP's headquarters, for example) -- so it's good that this isn't the case.

[felgall]

Actually, MaxMind says you are in Sydney.

http://www.maxmind.com/app/lookup_city

GeoIP databases track regional allocations of an ISP's IP space, not the location of the ISP.

They are more than 90% accurate to the city level -- that's accuracy in determining the true location of the user, not the ISP.

These databases would be worthless if your assumption were true (over 100 million American households would map to one of three cities of their ISP's headquarters, for example) -- so it's good that this isn't the case.

Obviously some programs are not using the right places to lookup their location data. The Secunia software security program running on my computer shows my location as Melbourne.

Still Sydney is a long way off from where I live so it still isn't all that accurate even with the more accurate data.

[BonyYousuf]

u can always use google api to locate user's location....