Canary Islands: how to retrieve the NIF for customs

When shipping to the Canary Islands, orders are subject to customs (check out our dedicated article). The Canary Islands are under a different tax regime than the rest of Spain because of their geographical location.

In order for a shipment to successfully go through customs, the end customer is required to share their tax ID, called NIF. It is equal to the Spanish ID number. For Spanish national citizens, it is called DNI. For foreigners, the NIF is the same as the NIE.

Retrieve the NIF effortlessly

🎉 Bigblue automatically scans the order data to identify the NIF in the customer-related fields.

Modify your Checkout on your CMS

It is recommended to ask your customer for the NIF at checkout for shipments to the Canary Islands.

To ask for the NIF, our advice is to modify the address fields in order to require customers to input this data in the checkout flow. Depending on your CMS, you can:

• Add a field - it is possible Woocommerce or Shopify Plus, but not for other Shopify plans
• Modify an existing field - for example, you can edit the Company field and name it Company or NIF for Canary Islands

If possible, make this field mandatory for orders whose country is Spain and whose province is "Las Palmas" or "Santa Cruz de Tenerife", also defined as zipcodes starting with 35 or 38.

If you are working with a CMS that is integrated with Bigblue, this modification is enough to ensure that most orders will be imported with the NIF filled 🚀

Add the NIF while creating orders using Bigblue Store API

If you're working with Bigblue Store API and need to ship orders to Canary Islands, you can add the NIF in customer-related fields in the order creation request, for example in any empty billing address field.

What happens if the NIF is missing or invalid?

The order will be blocked in Action Required. Depending on your settings, we’ll automatically contact customers to fill in this detail or you’ll have to manually contact them. See more information below.

Via our Tracking Page and Emails, we automatically contact customers who need to add/review their NIF

Thanks to Bigblue, you no longer have to do manual tasks for NIF collection. We have added the ability for customers to edit/add their NIF on the Tracking Page.

How does it work? We will automatically contact the customers whose NIF is missing, or invalid, and guide them to edit it on the Tracking page.

This way, your Canary Islands customers can successfully review their NIF data autonomously. This requires no manual tasks from your team. A win-win for your customers and your support team!

Note: If you are not using the tracking page

The order will be blocked in Action Required. You will have to manually check in with the customer to gather the information and add it to the order in the App.