Case study

How ZZEN Labs Solved Product Routing Across Its International Markets

Website

zzenlabs.com

Industry

Supplements

Location

Spain

About ZZEN Labs

ZZEN Labs is a Spanish nootropics brand with a straightforward premise: that effective cognitive support and clean formulas aren't mutually exclusive. They develop supplements built around ingredient quality and formula transparency, without the overclaiming that's common in the category.

Their catalog (currently focused on the European and US markets) is designed for people who actually read the label. Their flagship product, ZZEN Focus, is a natural nootropic formulated to support focus and mental performance, and it's built around the same principle that runs through everything ZZEN makes: no filler, no fluff, just ingredients that have a reason to be there.

Orbe's Features:

  • Geolocation popup
  • Products by country
  • Redirection to regional store
  • Country selector
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Challenge

ZZEN Labs operates with two legally distinct catalogs (one for Spain and the EU, and one for the US), which adds a layer of complexity that most international commerce tools aren't built to handle. 

When a brand operates across markets with different product catalogs, Shopify introduces a structural limitation that's easy to miss (until it starts costing you customers).

When a product is excluded from a given market, Shopify has no way to resolve where that user should land next. So the moment a Spanish user browsing the US version of a store accepts the redirect to their correct regional experience, Shopify pulls them out of the product page entirely and drops them on the homepage, with no trace of what they were originally looking for.

For ZZEN Labs, this wasn't an edge case they could afford to ignore. With two legally distinct catalogs and customers navigating across markets, this kind of mismatch had to be solved by design.

Take a real example. A user in the US lands on zzenlabs.com/en/products/zzen-nootropic (the English-language version of the product on the Spanish store). A geolocation popup detects the mismatch and prompts them to switch to their correct regional experience. They accept. And instead of landing on the US equivalent of that product, they're dropped on the homepage.

At that point, the product context is completely lost. In a category like nootropics, where customers need to read, compare, and build trust before they convert, asking them to find their way back from the homepage is asking too much. Most won't bother.

The challenge was clear: ZZEN Labs needed a solution that could redirect users not just to the right market, but to the right product within that market, without breaking the experience in the process.

Orbe has worked extremely well for our international setup. Because of regulatory requirements in the nutrition space, some of our products must have different versions and product pages in Spain and the US. With Orbe, each customer is automatically directed to the correct product page based on their location, which is critical for compliance.

Solution

ZZEN Labs found the right partner in Orbe. To address exactly this kind of cross-market product routing problem, Orbe introduced Country-Based Product Redirection, a feature that allows merchants to map equivalent products across markets. That means that, instead of relying on Shopify's default redirect logic, Orbe intercepts the redirection flow and checks whether a corresponding product exists in the user's correct market. If a match is configured, the user is sent directly to that product page rather than the homepage.

For ZZEN Labs, the setup works like this: a user in the US lands on zzenlabs.com/en/products/zzen-nootropic (the Spanish store's version of ZZEN Focus). Orbe detects their location, surfaces the geolocation popup, and prompts them to switch to the US experience. When they accept, instead of landing on the homepage, they are directed directly to zzenlabs.com/en-us/products/zzen-focus-nootropico-natural-us, the legally correct, market-appropriate equivalent of the product they were already viewing.

The product context and purchase intent are preserved, and the indexation of both product URLs remains intact, with no SEO side effects from the redirect logic.

This approach is particularly well-suited to regulated industries where product equivalence isn't always a 1:1 handle match. Orbe's product mapping layer gives merchants explicit control over which products correspond across markets, independent of URL structure or Shopify's native catalog logic.

Results

Implementing country-based product redirection with Orbe gave ZZEN Labs something their previous setup couldn't offer: the certainty that every redirected user would land exactly where they needed to be (and that Google would too).

Before the fix, the impact went beyond UX. ZZEN Labs had 8 product URLs affected by incorrect indexation: the European versions of their 4 products (each with a Spanish and English variant) were being indexed by Google for US searches, because Googlebot couldn't reliably crawl the US-specific URLs blocked behind geolocation. The result was a compounding problem: Google surfaced the wrong URLs, US users clicked on them, and those pages returned 404 errors. Purchase intent lost. Crawl budget wasted.

With Orbe's product mapping layer in place, each redirected user lands on the market-correct product page from the first interaction: no homepage detour, no dead ends. And because the redirect logic no longer depends on Shopify's default behavior, both URL variants can be properly crawled and indexed for their respective markets.

For brands in regulated categories like supplements, where the same product can legally be a different formulation depending on the market, this kind of precision routing isn't just a UX improvement. It's what makes a functional international presence possible.

8 URLs

Product pages fixed across EU and US markets

404 errors eliminated for US users landing on European product URLs.
0 detours

Purchase intent preserved from the first click

Every redirected user lands on the right product page, no matter where they entered.