Like the title says, what method does Shopify use to determine what country a new user is visiting from, and hence whether or not to apply taxes etc. etc.?

This leads on to a further question I have about tax settings, but let's focus on this for now.

According to a comment (https://www.reddit.com/r/shopify/comments/1nre7l4/comment/ngdtqck/) here, they use ".. IP address, it they’ve bought before, their address, etc...". Additionally, there is a brief mention (https://shopify.dev/docs/storefronts/themes/markets/multiple-currencies-languages#implementing-country-and-language-selectors) that "For merchants on the Shopify Plus plan, Shopify will use geolocation to detect where customers are located and automatically select the most relevant country from the options that the merchant has enabled." FWIW, we are on the basic plan.

I've done some testing, and not much of this seems to be the case. To view the site from abroad, I'm using NordVPN.

Shopify stores the country code (GB, US etc) in the "localization" cookie. When first visiting the site from ANY country, the code is set to GB - where my store is located. Doesn't matter where I view it from, it's always initially set to GB.

If there is a manual country selector displayed on the store, i.e. a drop-down list of countries that the user chooses one from, then that will update the cookie. I do not want a manual country selector.

If there is no manual country selector, the only time that the cookie gets updated is at checkout when the user selects their delivery country.

I have not found any other situation where the country is automatically updated, suggesting that Shopify is not able to automatically sense the user's location.

Can anyone please give some hard confirmation about this?