Almost every piece of ecommerce advice written in Spanish comes from the mainland and assumes a territory with no customs border. In the Canary Islands that assumption doesn't hold, and the difference isn't a tax footnote: it changes the final price, the delivery date, and the number you need in your calculator before switching on a campaign.
This is what I explain to any Canarian business before touching their ads.
The Canary Islands sit outside the VAT territory
Everything else follows from this. The Canary Islands are part of the European Union but not part of the VAT territory or, for this purpose, the customs union. In its place there is IGIC, with a standard rate of 7% plus reduced, increased and zero rates for certain goods.
Three practical consequences:
A shipment from mainland Spain to the Canaries is an export. It leaves without VAT and arrives with import IGIC, and it needs a customs declaration. That paperwork costs money, and somebody pays it: either the seller absorbs it, or it reaches the customer as a surprise when the parcel arrives.
A shipment from the Canaries to the mainland is an import for the buyer. Same effect, reversed.
The price you display and the price you charge stop matching unless you configure it. A shop built on the standard template shows tax-inclusive prices to everyone. You're showing the Canarian customer a price that doesn't apply to them and the mainland customer one that does. One of the two is going to be annoyed.
"We don't ship to the Canary Islands" is still your best opportunity
Half the shops in Spain still don't ship to the islands, or do it with a surcharge and a delivery estimate that scares people off. If your business is here and your stock is here, that isn't a disadvantage: it's the advantage.
It's the one thing a better-funded mainland shop can't copy this week.
What's usually underused is how it's said. "We ship to the Canary Islands" in the footer does nothing. What converts is saying it where the decision happens: on the product page, with the real number of days, and with the sentence that removes the fear — who pays the customs handling and whether anything will be charged on delivery.
Four things to fix before spending on ads
1. Tax calculation in the shop. Configure tax by zone and display prices with or without tax depending on where the visitor is. It's half an hour of setup and it removes half the carts abandoned at the last step.
2. The real shipping cost per island. Tenerife isn't El Hierro, and a 2 kg parcel isn't a 12 kg one. A flat rate means you're subsidising the orders that cost you most and scaring off the ones with the best margin. A table by weight and zone is boring and it saves the margin.
3. A written delivery time with customs inside it. If transit is two days and clearance can take three more, the lead time is five. Promising two and delivering in five costs more than promising five.
4. Who pays the import handling. Decide it, write it, and put it before checkout. The worst version is not deciding: the customer finds out when they're asked to pay to release the parcel, and that review will follow you around.
Until those four are done, putting budget into ads is paying to send people somewhere a surprise is waiting.
What this does to your ROAS
Every one of those items comes out of the same pocket: the margin. And margin is what sets your break-even ROAS. A Canarian business that absorbs the customs handling and part of the freight can be running eight or ten points of margin below a mainland competitor selling exactly the same product at the same price.
That doesn't mean you can't compete. It means the ROAS target has to be higher, that average order value matters more here than elsewhere, and that grouping orders — bundles, multi-packs, free shipping above a threshold that genuinely pays for itself — stops being a tactic and becomes the structure of the business.
And the part almost nobody automates
All of the above generates repetitive paperwork: preparing documentation for each shipment, telling the customer where clearance stands, reconciling what the shop says with what the carrier says and with what the bank says.
It's exactly the kind of work that breaks when volume rises, and that nobody sees until it breaks.
It's also the easiest to take off your plate: shipment status, customer notifications and the reconciliation between shop, carrier and payments can all be automated inside tools you already pay for. Services covers how, and if yours is a specifically Canarian case, automation in the Canary Islands has the detail of how I work here.
If you sell from the islands and you feel margin leaking somewhere you can't identify, tell me about it. It's usually two of these four things.
Rates and procedures change. Before configuring your shop, confirm the IGIC rate that applies to your products and the current clearance procedure with your accountant or with the Canarian tax authority.