Today, anyone with a device connected to the internet can shop online – anytime and anywhere. That means there are more opportunities than ever before for businesses to reach a global audience. In 2021, worldwide retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately USD 4.9 trillion, and are forecasted to grow to USD 7.4 trillion by 2025. But with so many options available, how do you make sure your business stands out from the rest?
Shopify’s answer to that is Shopify Markets, which is their cross-border management tool that enables merchants to identify, create, launch, improve and manage their international markets from a single Shopify back-end.
In this blog post, we’ll explore everything you need to know about Shopify Markets.
What is Shopify Markets?
Shopify Markets enables merchants to create tailored online shopping experiences for different segments. It’s all done from one centralized admin dashboard, where you can create markets that target specific countries or regions, or you can group countries and regions together to simplify your expansion efforts.
Shopify Markets features
Shopify Markets is available to merchants on all plans. Here are some of the key features:
International domains
If you want to attract customers from around the world, you need to tailor your shopping experience to their needs. By using international domains, you can offer localized shopping experiences that will appeal to customers in different countries and regions.
With Shopify Markets, you can use custom domains specific to a country or region, which enables you to create a localized version of your online store in the currency and language that is most relevant to that country or region. According to research from Shopify, 75% of shoppers want to buy products in their native language, and 65% rarely or never buy from English-only stores.
On top of all of that, it also enables:
- Localized product feeds for other channels: By using third-party apps from the App Store you can easily create and distribute localized product feeds via Google, Meta, and other channels.
- Regional recommendations: Every opportunity should be used to offer customers something relevant to them – By using their country and language based on their geographic location, direct them to a localized buying experience.
Shopify Markets supports a variety of domain types including top-level domains, subdomains, and subfolders – which is everything a store would need to expand globally.
Local currencies and pricing
Shopify Markets offers merchants complete control of their pricing and currency on a per-country or per-region basis. This is important as it allows you to stay competitive in each market that you expand to.
- Currency conversion: Based on global exchange rates, Shopify Markets can convert prices to your customer’s local currency, and automatically apply rounding to improve conversion.
- Product pricing by market: To optimize your international pricing strategy, set percentage adjustments or custom prices for products in each market. This will allow you to compete better in each market and ultimately increase your overall sales.
Localized content and catalogs
Additionally, with Shopify Markets, merchants have the ability to customize their catalogs on a per-country or per-region basis based on stock levels. This is key for offering the right products to the right market, while at the same time keeping shipping costs down and ensure fast delivery.
- Store content by market: Customize the content of your storefront, so it accounts for regional and cultural aspects in each market.
- Language translation: Translate your store into multiple languages and set selections for each market.
Checkout localization
Improvements in the checkout process have huge impacts on the conversion rate, and with most other cases, it’s all about personalizing the experience to make it relevant and seamless as customers are more likely to purchase from a store that makes things easy for them.
- Local payment methods: Your customers can checkout using their preferred payment method, including Shop Pay, Mobile Pay, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay (which requires Shopify Payments). This way, they can choose what’s best for them and have a seamless checkout experience.
- Localized address forms: Remove the hassle for international customers by automatically localizing address forms with Google autocomplete.
- Estimated duties and import taxes: Let customers know exactly what they will be paying for by collecting estimated duties and import taxes for their location at checkout. This way, shipping carriers can remit them to customs without any surprises.
Duties, shipping, and sale taxes
Shopify markets provides an estimate of all duties and import taxes that may be attached to a purchase at checkout, which gives shoppers complete visibility of all associated costs.
The most popular local payment methods are also supported and if enabled, they are automatically used to optimize checkout conversion rates and minimize the risk of cart abandonment.
When to use Shopify Markets
Shopify Markets is the ideal choice when you want to create a localized copy of your store to expand quickly and efficiently. If you’re concerned with the operational overhead of managing multiple different stores to support your global expansion, then Shopify Markets might be a great place to start.
As explained by Shopify:
“For merchants who have globally dispersed teams that independently manage operations in their local market, it’s often preferred to sell cross-border using multiple stores along with the ability to sell and get paid in different currencies for your international selling strategy.”
Shopify Markets vs multiple stores
Sometimes having multiple separate stores (also known as expansion stores) makes more sense than operating a single store with Shopify Markets – It really depends on the flexibility that you’re looking for, and the resources you have available to manage the workload that comes with having multiple stores.
There is a few clear cases as to when you should be using multiple stores instead of Shopify Markets:
- Restricting products based on geography: There’s currently no way to restrict products or collections to a group of customers (based on geography or tags) other than using the stock levels to always hide out-of-stock products. This however might change soon, as it looks like Shopify is working on functionality to support this.
- Region/country specific campaigns: If you’re running different campaigns across stores, where you need to change entire pages, you’ll want the freedom and flexibility to be able to change that easily in the Shopify Customizer, which Shopify Markets currently today has no out-of-the-box way of supporting.
Getting started with Shopify Markets
We know how daunting it can be to try and sell internationally for the first time. That’s why we’re here to help! We want to make sure that your transition into Shopify Markets is as smooth as possible. If you have any questions or need assistance along the way, don’t hesitate to reach out to us using our contact form or directly set up a meeting with us using the button in the bottom right corner.
