WooCommerce: Get EU, EU VAT, EEA, SCA Countries

When you deal with conditional payment gateways, or conditional notifications, or conditional content, you may need to use to check the current billing country against an array of countries (in plain English, you may want to know if the customer is based in a specific World area), such as the European Union.

Thankfully, WooCommerce gives us a nice prebuilt function so that we don’t need to create the array of EU countries manually. On top of that, it’s easy to manipulate that array in order to add / remove countries for different uses, such as getting the list of EEA (European Economic Area) countries or SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) countries. In this post, I will give you some shortcuts to “calculate” these arrays, so that you don’t need to bother doing it.

Please note, EU, EEA and SCA countries are constantly changing, so these arrays are updated to the date you see on top of this post. Enjoy!

PHP Snippet 1: Get Eu Countries (WooCommerce)

In this case, the get_european_union_countries function is kept up to date by WooCommerce, so you can rest assured you always get the correct list of countries.

/**
 * @snippet       Get Array of EU Country Codes @ WooCommerce
 * @how-to        Get CustomizeWoo.com FREE
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 7
 * @donate $9     https://businessbloomer.com/bloomer-armada/
 */

$eu = WC()->countries->get_european_union_countries();

PHP Snippet 2: Get Eu VAT Countries (WooCommerce)

It seems that “MC” (Monaco) is not part of the EU, but belongs to the EU VAT system. We love complicated things here in Europe. If you need an array of EU VAT countries, use the below variaiton instead:

/**
 * @snippet       Get Array of EU VAT Country Codes @ WooCommerce
 * @how-to        Get CustomizeWoo.com FREE
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 7
 * @donate $9     https://businessbloomer.com/bloomer-armada/
 */

$euvat = WC()->countries->get_european_union_countries( 'eu_vat' );

PHP Snippet 3: Get EEA Countries (WooCommerce)

The European Economic Area is an international agreement which enables the extension of the European Union’s single market to member states of the European Free Trade Association.

/**
 * @snippet       Get Array of EEA Country Codes @ WooCommerce
 * @how-to        Get CustomizeWoo.com FREE
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 7
 * @donate $9     https://businessbloomer.com/bloomer-armada/
 */

$eea = array_merge(
	array( 'IS', 'LI', 'NO' ),
	WC()->countries->get_european_union_countries()
);

PHP Snippet 4: Get SCA Countries (WooCommerce)

Strong customer authentication (SCA) is a requirement of the EU Revised Directive on Payment Services (PSD2) on payment service providers within the European Economic Area, plus the UK and Switzerland. The requirement ensures that electronic payments are performed with multi-factor authentication, to increase the security of electronic payments.

/**
 * @snippet       Get Array of SCA Country Codes @ WooCommerce
 * @how-to        Get CustomizeWoo.com FREE
 * @author        Rodolfo Melogli
 * @compatible    WooCommerce 7
 * @donate $9     https://businessbloomer.com/bloomer-armada/
 */

$sca = array_merge(
	array( 'IS', 'LI', 'NO', 'CH', 'GB' ),
	WC()->countries->get_european_union_countries()
);