"Is Shopify POS available in my country?" has a two-part answer, and Shopify's marketing page only gives you the first part: nearly every country in the world.

That's true of the app. Shopify POS runs on iOS and Android, syncs inventory and orders with your admin, and will happily take cash anywhere on earth.

The second part is where it gets interesting. Taking a card on Shopify POS with an integrated reader requires Shopify Payments to support in-person processing in your country — and Shopify maintains that country list in two places that currently disagree with each other.

The Shopify Payments for POS setup page lists 18 countries. The POS feature comparison table, one click away in the same help center, lists 15. The three that appear on one and not the other are the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, and Switzerland.

That's a small discrepancy with a large implication: if you are trying to determine whether your country is supported, checking one page is not enough. And if you're outside both lists — Japan is the largest such market — you are buying a point-of-sale system that cannot close a card transaction on its own.

Below: exactly what POS Pro adds at $89/location/month, which of those additions still work without Shopify Payments, and the billing rules that decide whether you can get your money back. Research date: September 1, 2026.

The short version

If you're in one of the supported countries and you run a permanent store with exchanges and stock counts, POS Pro is not optional. Refunds are free; exchanges are not. That single row decides it for most retailers.

If you're outside the supported countries, treat Shopify POS as an inventory and order system, not a payment terminal. Cards go through a separate device, and you record the result in POS as a custom payment. Pro's $89 still buys real things — staff permissions, stock transfers, exchanges — but you're paying it on top of a payment stack Shopify isn't providing.

If you're on Shopify Plus, your first 20 POS Pro locations are already included. Merchants who don't know this pay $89 × 20 × 12 = $21,360 a year for something they already have.

If you sell in person a few times a year at markets or popups, the in-person selling features bundled with every paid plan are enough. Better still, if you let a Pro trial lapse without acting, Shopify drops you back to those features at no charge rather than billing you.

What every paid plan already includes

Shopify POS is an app you install from the Shopify App Store. Before it will work at all, multi-location has to be enabled in your store settings — a step that catches people out.

The features included with any paid plan, per Shopify's own comparison table:

• Customizable smart grid (the till screen layout)
• Add and edit customer profiles
• The Customer View app (customer-facing display)
• Multi-location inventory, orders, and customer management
• Email and SMS receipts
• Discount codes and manual discounts, by amount or percentage
• Selling and redeeming gift cards
• Camera barcode scanning
• Custom sales — ring up something that isn't in your catalog
• Offline cash payments
• Refunds
• Cash tracking
• Changing inventory quantities

So the basic loop — pick items, take payment, send a receipt, decrement stock — closes without paying anything extra. For a weekend market stall, that's the whole job.

The 20 rows that require Pro

These are the rows in Shopify's comparison table where the free tier gets an ✘ and Pro gets a ✔:

• Custom printed receipts
• Automatic discounts
• Retail staff permissions and management
• Unlimited POS-only staff
• Add staff to sale
• Order cancellations
• Exchanges
• Save and retrieve cart
• Email carts
• Ship to home
• Ship and carry out
• Pickup in store
• Local delivery fulfillment
• Tracking and adjusting inventory
• Receiving stock transfers
• Fulfilling and receiving transfers
• Daily sales reports
• In-app retail store analytics
• Required checkout information
• Hardware warranty (1 year → 2 years)

Two of these deserve to be pulled out of the list.

Refunds are included; exchanges are not. If a customer walks in with the wrong size, the free tier can give them their money back and then sell them the right size as a separate transaction. It cannot process that as an exchange. For apparel, footwear, or anything else where swaps are routine, this one row is the whole decision.

"Changing inventory quantities" is included; "tracking and adjusting inventory" is not. These sound like the same thing and aren't. Overwriting a number is free. Doing a stock count, or receiving a transfer from another location, is Pro. Any retailer with more than one stockroom hits this immediately.

What breaks outside the supported countries

The first row of Shopify's comparison table is "Integrated payment hardware with Shopify Payments," with the countries in parentheses: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Fifteen.

The Shopify Payments for POS page lists those fifteen plus the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. Eighteen.

If you're outside both lists, three concrete things follow.

Card payments happen off-platform. You process the card on a separate terminal and record the amount in Shopify POS as a custom payment. Totals and inventory reconcile; processing fees and payout timing live outside Shopify entirely.

The pricing page tells you this if you read it carefully. Shopify's US POS pricing page quotes an in-person card rate — 2.6% + 10¢ on Basic — alongside the online rate. Regional pricing pages for unsupported markets show only online and third-party-provider rates. Japan's page, for instance, lists 3.55% online and 2% for third-party providers, with no in-person line at all. The absence is the answer.

Non-payment hardware still works. Receipt printers, barcode scanners, and cash drawers are marked as supported on all plans. What's geographically limited is payment hardware integration, not peripherals generally.

For merchants in unsupported markets, the practical pattern is to make a local POS system the system of record for payments and use an integration app to keep Shopify's inventory and customers in sync. In Japan, the app in the Shopify App Store that does this for the Smaregi cloud POS is スマレジ連携アプリ V3 by Hiyaku Inc, which prices by sync operations rather than orders — from $39/month for inventory-only sync with a 3,000-operation allowance, up to $995/month with 50,000. It's Japanese-language only, has no English support, and as of September 1, 2026 carries zero reviews on the App Store. Equivalent local-POS bridges exist in other unsupported markets; the pricing-by-sync-volume pattern is worth checking for wherever you are, because it doesn't behave like per-order pricing when you run a bulk update.

The billing rules that catch people

Plus includes 20 locations. Every Shopify Plus plan includes the first 20 POS Pro locations. Beyond 20, the fee is waived on all retail locations up to your plan maximum if you process at least one retail transaction per month through Shopify Payments at any location — which is another reason the country list matters, since merchants outside it can't satisfy that condition.

POS Pro bills on its own clock. The subscription runs on a 30-day app billing cycle that starts when you activate it, separate from your Shopify plan's cycle. Adding a location mid-cycle prorates. Plus merchants can only use the 30-day cycle; everyone else can choose monthly or annual.

The refund window is narrow. Downgrade within 7 days of a monthly cycle start, or within 30 days of an annual billing date, and you can request a refund. Miss it and there is no prorated refund at all. Brazil-based stores get 90 days on both.

You cannot move a Pro subscription between locations. Cancel it on one location and activate it on another and you'll be billed for both. Transfers require contacting Shopify Support.

All locations share one billing schedule. Switching monthly → annual applies immediately with proration. Annual → monthly waits until your annual cycle ends. And bulk changes are capped at 250 locations per action.

Lapsing is safe; uninstalling isn't. If your trial ends and you do nothing, locations revert to the free in-person features. But if you want to remove the POS sales channel entirely, you have to downgrade every Pro location first.

Pre-purchase checklist

• Confirm whether your country appears on both Shopify country lists, not just one
• If it doesn't, decide which terminal processes cards and how that gets recorded in POS
• Do you process exchanges in store? (Pro required)
• Do you run stock counts or receive inter-location transfers on the shop floor? (Pro required)
• Have you split locations into those that need Pro and those that don't?
• On Plus, are you inside the 20-location allowance?
• Is multi-location enabled in store settings?
• If using an integration app, what's the billing denominator — orders, or sync operations?
• Are there charges billed outside your Shopify invoice?

Bottom line

Three questions, in order:

1. Is Shopify Payments available for in-person processing where you are? Check both lists. If no, you're designing around a payment gap, and every other decision follows from that.
2. Do exchanges and stock transfers happen on your shop floor? Refunds are free; exchanges, cancellations, stock counts, and transfer receiving are not. Those four rows decide Pro for most stores.
3. Are you buying per location, deliberately? Pro is a per-location subscription, not a store-wide one. Flagship on Pro, popup on the free tier is a legitimate configuration — and on Plus, the first twenty are free.

Both pricing and country availability change. Check Shopify's pricing page and the help center country list before you commit — and, as covered above, check both help center pages, because right now they don't agree.