In the Admin Panel under Stores > (Settings) Configuration > (General) General > Country Options within the global scope, admins can configure the list of member countries of the European Union (EU).
What is this actually used for? Adobe’s documentation does not really say.
Context
There’s been EU legislation against geoblocking in force since late 2018 which de-facto requires European shops to accept contact and billing addresses from anywhere within the Union (perhaps even in French, Dutch and Spanish overseas territories, but definitely including non-member Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein, though not Switzerland), but still allows restrictions for shipping addresses and also still allows different delivery fees based upon the shipping address but not on the billing address.
We are considering to reuse the list of EU countries for allowed billing address countries, while restricting only shipping addresses to the countries in the Allow Countries list.
- Related module (but Magento 1): https://github.com/aligent/magento_availableaddresses
- Related question (but Magento 1): EU-Geoblocking requirements for Magento 1