The meteoric rise of ecommerce has paved the way for the global online sales boom, with 22% of total worldwide ecommerce sales now being made cross-border. Any brand looking to capitalize on this massive and ever-growing opportunity needs to start thinking about their international growth strategy.

Our own data shows that an average of 30% of the visitors to your online store are coming from an international market. In the past, converting those visitors was a lot more involved than selling to domestic customers, and something many merchants don’t have the resources for. Adding new regions to your roster meant more operational complexity and risk, in addition to the time needed to create a great buying experience to ensure they convert for those who use different currencies and speak other languages.

That’s why we created Shopify's international sales tools to help any merchant sell effectively in multiple countries from a single store.

Markets enables you to sell globally by allowing you to quickly add new markets and convert visitors into repeat buyers, while managing everything from your Shopify admin. As you scale, it’s easy to identify new opportunities for growth, refine your localized buying experiences, and optimize your international selling strategy.

Table of Contents

Sell in local currencies with Shopify Payments
Translate your store into multiple languages
Adapt store content by market
Customize your store’s domain for each market
Offer local payment methods with Shopify Payments
Collect duties and import taxes upfront
Optimize new markets quickly
Configure your own market areas
Set custom pricing by market
Customize product publishing by market
Define order routing rules by market
Take the next step toward global greatness with Managed Markets from Shopify

Increase sales by localizing your online store for international visitors

Markets help you create tailored buying experiences for customers in different countries or regions, letting them shop in their local currency and language, pay with local payment methods, and more. Offering customers a familiar shopping and checkout experience builds trust, which drives conversion.

Sell in local currencies

Your international customers expect to see prices in their local currency, and our own data proves that products shown in a customer’s local currency can increase conversion rates up to 40%.

When combined with Shopify Payments, Markets can automatically convert your storefront prices to more than 130 international currencies, based on the latest foreign exchange rates, and round them up to consistent price endings across your localized store. From storefront and checkout to notifications and refunds, Markets provides a consistent multicurrency experience so your international customers can shop with confidence.

Translate your store in multiple languages

A survey of 8,709 global consumers in 29 countries found that 65% prefer content in their language when making purchases online, and 40% won’t even consider buying from websites they can’t read. Our own data shows a 13% relative increase in conversion when buyers were shown a store translated into their language compared to the same one in the default language.

Using Shopify’s Translate & Adapt app, which pairs perfectly with Shopify's international sales tools, you can auto-translate your store in up to two languages for free, and manually add or edit as many language translations as you wish. Similar to currencies, languages work consistently across your store to provide your customers with a holistic localized experience.

Adapt store content by market

With Shopify’s Translate & Adapt app, you can go a step beyond language translation and adapt custom content to better connect with local customers. Ensure your store maintains cultural, seasonal, and regional relevance—even between markets that speak the same language—by accounting for variations in spelling, vocabulary, and messaging.

Customize your store's domain for each market

International domains increase the visibility of your store on search engines, help attract new customers, and drive conversion. Markets makes setting a region-specific domain simple by automatically creating subfolders when you create a new market. This means that your domestic market can be at example.com and an international market for Canada can live at example.com/en-ca. You can also choose to set a subdomain (ca.example.com) or a country code top-level domain (example.ca) based on your preference.

Whatever you choose, Shopify's international sales tools automatically sets the right SEO tags so your international buyers see the right domain in their search results. Visitors who navigate to the wrong domain can be automatically redirected to the right shopping experience based on their location. In instances where auto-redirects don’t work as intended (like in the EU, where you aren’t allowed to automatically redirect visitors), the Geolocation app can prompt customers to choose the correct market based on their location.

Offer local payment methods

Online payment methods can heavily influence buying decisions. In some regions, customers prefer to pay using services they recognize and trust, which vary around the world.

Offering your international customers local payment methods can have a significant impact on conversion. For example, our own data showed that adding Bancontact as a payment method led to a significant increase (150 basis points) with Belgian buyers. When using multiple currencies, Markets makes it easy to add major European payment methods to your checkout to help reduce abandoned carts.

Collect duties and import taxes upfront

International buyers may find it unclear if additional duties or import taxes will apply to their purchase, which can result in less-than-ideal customer experiences, parcel refusals, and chargebacks. As such, duties and import taxes are an important part of your international strategy.

Markets makes it easy for international customers to have a great experience with your business by collecting duties and import taxes at checkout. This gives your customers total cost clarity on their purchase and fewer surprises at delivery.

Fine-tune your operations with Shopify's international sales tools Markets

Optimize new markets quickly

Markets streamlines the process of international expansion by automatically implementing the right currency and domain subfolder when you create a new market. This ensures that your international customers can find you online and browse in the currency they’re most likely to use. What’s more, data-driven recommendations help you enter the most viable markets strategically and efficiently to ensure you’re set up for success.

Configure your own market areas

Markets lets you organize your international business in the way that makes sense for you. Depending on your business, it could be more beneficial to manage multiple countries or regions as a group versus individually, which can help you expand more broadly without having to duplicate your localization work. For example, you may want to create a market for all of Europe or Asia Pacific (don’t worry, you can do this and still present prices in local currencies with local payment methods to your buyers in those markets).

Set custom pricing by market

One size doesn’t always fit all, and the pricing strategy that works in your primary market likely won’t be the same for every market you want to expand to.

Markets helps you take greater control of your pricing strategy by allowing you to set percentage-based price adjustments for all products within a specific market to account for things like increased shipping costs. Or, if you want to set a custom fixed price for a product in a specific market, Shopify's international sales tools let you do that, too.

Customize product publishing by market

When selling internationally, you may want to customize your product offering across the different markets. This could be due to licensing agreements that only allow you to sell a certain product to a specific market, regional regulations that limit what can be shipped to a specific market, or because you want to offer slightly different products or packaging to better align with buyer preferences in different markets.

Markets helps you take control of which products are published on your store for each of your markets. This feature, paired with the ability to manage pricing by market, allows you to tailor your international merchandising strategy in all the places you sell to.

Define order routing rules by market

In today’s competitive environment, proper and efficient order routing is critical for any direct-to-consumer brand—especially if you manage inventory across multiple locations. Whether you are self-shipping your products or partially outsourcing, assigning the best location to ship orders from is critical to drive down costs, surface the right shipping cost and transit time to shoppers, and speed up delivery times.

To help speed up your order fulfillment, Shopify will soon be launching smart order routing to give you full control of your delivery process. For example, use the new split fulfillment rule to prioritize which location fulfills the order based on stock availability. The new closest location rule ensures that orders are fulfilled from the store location or warehouse that’s closest to the customer. This results in a fast and frictionless delivery experience for your customer.

Take the next step towards building your global empire with Managed Markets from Shopify

Markets lets you pick the features that are most relevant to your global growth strategy. However, some brands might require additional features that are available in a single solution.

Introducing Managed Markets from Shopify—an all-in-one crossborder solution that helps brands enter hundreds of markets in a few clicks. Managed Markets is built on the foundations of Shopify's international sales tools, which gives merchants flexibility to pick and choose the features they want to leverage. Managed Markets provides a single turnkey solution with additional features that handle risk and complexity.

Now, merchants can access features like pre-negotiated international shipping rates, prepaid duties, financial risk and fraud protection, and enhanced payment methods to boost conversion, bundled with all Shopify's localization tools of in one solution that supports rapid international growth.

Start going global today

Global commerce isn’t the future—it’s the present, and it’s here to stay. That’s why we created Shopify's international sales tools: because we believe international success should be accessible to everyone.

Log in to start using Shopify's international sales tools

Rohit Mishra