Hi,
If someone can help me with this i would really appreciate it. Shopify dont seem to be able to offer any advice on this.
I am about to launch a wholesale website for targeting all of Europe.
Our company is based here in Ireland
I want to be able to target all countries across Europe, but my key markets are Ireland, UK, Germany, France, Italy & Spain.
The original way I was going to set this up was use robertwholesale.eu (example url) for everything and just offer the website in multiple languages, which i thought would be robertwholesale.eu/fr for french etc. But because i need to use Ireland as my primary market instead of the region EU it changes the domains slightly to having .eu/fr-eu if I was to put all other counties in its own EU marketplace.
So im really just looking for advice on the best way to set this up. Are top level country domains still important? Germany is a massive market so should it be set up as robertwholesale.de which gives the default language as German? or is it better to keep all countries under the one domain robertwholesale.eu so they all rank together as a whole with google.
I have come up with the 3 following Scenarios:
Option 1.
7 domains with 7 separate markets on shopify
Ireland Market - robertwholesale.ie - English version ONLY
Germany Market - robertwholesale.de - German & English version ONLY
Spain Market- robertwholesale.es - Spanish & English version ONLY
France Market- robertwholesale.fr - French & English version ONLY
Italy Market - robertwholesale.it - Italian & English version ONLY
All other EU countries - robertwholesale.eu - all 5 language translations
UK - robertwholesale.co.uk - English version ONLY
Or
Option 2.
3 domains names with 3 separate markets on shopify
Ireland Market - robertwholesale.ie - English version ONLY
EU Market - robertwholesale.eu - All 5 languages
Example: robertwholesale.eu/fr for French, robertwholesale.eu/de for German etc
UK Market - robertwholesale.co.uk - English version ONLY
Or
Option 3.
2 domain names with 3 separate markets on shopify
Ireland Market - robertwholesale.eu - English version ONLY
EU - robertwholesale.eu - All languages
Example: robertwholesale.eu/fr-eu for French, robertwholesale.eu/de-eu for German etc
UK -robertwholesale.co.uk - English version ONLY
Note: I have kept the UK separate in all scenarios as they are no longer in the EU and have a different currency
Again if anyone can offer any help at all it would be a great help. Thanks for reading this far!
