International parcels must now require customers’ CPF number

Brazil’s national postal service, Correios, has announced that, as of January 1^st, 2020, all international parcels that arrive in Brazil must include the customer’s CPF – the Brazilian individual taxpayer’s registry identification – or any other valid document, such as the CNPJ (company fiscal number) or passport number. Parcels that do not attend to this requirement will be returned or destroyed. The new requirement meets the regulations of the Receita Federal, the Brazilian tax authority.

The information must be collected at the moment of the online purchase and provided with the parcel for transportation. However, buyers may also manually submit the CPF number at the Correios website using the tracking tool or through the import portal, called Minhas Importações. To do so, the customer needs to register at the portal and provide their personal data. After that, the buyers can simply search for their orders and link the shipments to the CPF. The goods will only be presented to customs inspection after the required data is supplied.

In order to avoid delivery issues, online stores must request the shopper’s CPF at the checkout page so as to comply with the new standards. Since the new measure will soon be effective for all goods that arrive in the country, it is crucial that merchants include this information from now onwards.

How to prepare your Shopify store for the new requirement

The CPF field is not a native feature of Shopify, which means merchants must find an alternative solution to meet the new requirements. A common practice is to add the field “Company name” to the checkout and change the placeholder and label in the language editor.

To do so, simply access the admin environment and go to Settings > Checkout > Company Name and check the Required option. After that, access Online Store and select Edit Languages at menu Actions. Using the Filter Translations field, search for “Company” (or “Empresa”, if you are using the Portuguese version), and replace it for “CPF”.

For more information, a detailed tutorial from Shopify Expert Bruno Brito shows the step-by-step process. The content is in Portuguese, but it may be useful for you to have a clearer understanding while looking at the screens.  Watch here.