Shopify Markets vs. Shopify Markets Pro Do you need it for international selling?

If you want to expand your market by selling internationally there can be quite a lot of logistics to get clear as well as legal matters. Shopify has the functionality to help you out, but it comes at a price. In this article, we’ll go through the features of Shopify Markets and Shopify Markets Pro and discuss if they’re a good choice for your business.

Selling online internationally used to be a complicated affair. Most customers prefer to shop on sites in their own language, they are more trusting of local URLs and they don’t like to pay for the products in foreign currencies. Therefore, to be successful with your international sales, you’d need a separate webshop for each country – a logistic mess for many reasons such as separate product catalogs, order systems, etc. That was at least the case until Shopify launched Shopify Markets in September 2021.

What is Shopify Markets?

Shopify Markets is a feature add-on for your Shopify webshop which makes it easier to sell internationally. It does so with a set of features all available from a single dashboard including settings such as:

• Unique domains:
  You’re now able to have local domains for each market
• Language options:
  You can now easily change each markets language on the website
• Local currency:
  The customers can now make their purchases in their own currency
• SEO:
  With Shopify Markets each of your shops are optimized for Google for each country
• Payment methods:
  The preferred payment methods highly vary from country to country and more payment options are added with Shopify Markets (but even more with Shopify Markets Pro)
• Duty and import tax transparency:
• To not make your customers pay unexpected extra fees they’ll get an overview of the extra taxes and duties at checkout automatically with Shopify Markets
• Pricing control:
  Adjust the prices of the products independently for each market
• Custom content:
  Change the content displayed on each market site

What is Shopify Markets Pro?

For now, Shopify Markets Pro is only available in the US. Less than half a year after the release of Shopify Markets, the feature set was expanded with the launch of Shopify Markets Pro in February 2022. The pro version brought in a set of even more advanced automations for a safer shopping experience for you and your customers available for a total of 136 markets. This included the following:

• An additional amount of local payment options
• Manage your product catalog for the specific countries to automatically exclude products prohibited on certain markets
• Access guaranteed currency exchange rates and prevented currency fluctuations with full refunds up to 30 days after purchase using the same exchange as the day of purchase.
• Stay covered in the events of fraud on foreign orders
• Calculation of duty and import taxes already made for the customer at the checkout

Main differences:

In many cases, you’ll be fine with Shopify Markets, but the Pro version does come with valuable features for US merchants. The differences between the two mainly come down to customization options and safety features for you and the customer in regard to local laws in the different countries. This saves you from a lot of research and worries of potentially overseeing legal matters specific to each country. The safety features in this context are both valuable for you and the customers as Shopify has done the work for you regarding international sales, taxes and fees, so you won’t end up with unexpected extra bills. 

Costs:

The price. Shopify Markets can save you a lot of time when selling internationally and the Pro version takes away worries about crossing legal matters. It is, however, not cheap as these features are paid for with an extra fee on each transaction. The rates are as follows:

• Shopify Markets: 2% (1.5% in the US)
• Shopify Markets Pro: 6.5% + 2.5% currency conversion fee which is paid by the customer and added in the checkout.

Conclusion

Therefore, whether the extra features are worth it completely depends on your business, its size and resources. For a smaller business, the features are great as they’re relatively cheap and most of all an easy way to expand your sales to new markets. However, for larger corporations with high volume turnover, it may be a better investment to do the research yourself and launch it with independent stores as especially the Markets Pro service takes a big cut of your profits.