Expand globally with international domains

[coleatkinson]

Shopify merchants can now assign individual domains to a country/region. This allows you to offer a default currency and language (or set of language options) on individual domains in order to provide a localized browsing experience to your buyers all around the world. This feature is available to merchants on Shopify, Shopify Advanced, and Shopify Plus plans.

For example, let’s say you are a merchant based in the United States, currently selling both within the US and to Canada on your website shop.com. You can now:

• Use your existing shop.com domain to target the United States with USD as the default currency and English as the default language
• Setup shop.ca or ca.shop.com to target Canada with CAD as the default currency, English as the default language, and French as a language option.

When using international domains and multiple languages, Shopify automatically handles all hreflang and SEO best practices to give your site the best chance of being indexed regionally by search engines. If a buyer happens to land on the wrong domain, you can provide on site currency and language recommendations using the Geolocation app.

International domains rely on merchants selling in multiple currencies with Shopify Payments, and to offer multiple languages you must offer translations via a compatible 3rd party translations app.

NOTE: Merchants are responsible for adding their own top level domains (TLDs) or subdomains for use with this feature. International domains does not alter the domain purchasing flow or guarantee the availability of new domains for you to purchase.

Resources

• Help Center documentation - international domains
• Help Center documentation - redirection of domains
• Changelog post
• Shopify ReUnite announcement

If you have any questions or feedback about this new feature reply below as we’d love to hear from you. If you looking for troubleshooting support please get in touch with our support team, or create a new topic providing as much detail as possible.

[gotcha]

Hello, i am interested in this option , and i have also received recently an email about this functionality , but my question is :

Will the warehouse be separated for each domain , so we can add products with different titles and will works with internal search ?

The internal search and the product name in chekout are both a major issue with shopify multishops , and i am asking if has been solved by this update

thanks

[coleatkinson]

Thanks for your interest in the feature! International domains doesn't change anything about the back end fulfillment functionality in Shopify - you can look at using Shipping Profiles to ensure that orders from certain countries only ship from locations/warehouses that you want them to.

Offering different products/content on different domains doesn't yet happen natively with this feature; you can reach out to a Shopify expert to customize such functionality for you in your theme, or you would continue to use multiple Shopify stores to do this.

[Fritzle]

I was also wondering - with payment. Say the main shop began in Aust but I use the international domain for expansion into the US. OK cool so I've got a warehouse in the US also and the locals in america get packages sent from there. What happens with payment. Does US payments go into the Aust bank account? Are the fees high for int transfers? I'm trying to figure out if its better to just duplicate the store, buy a new domain for US and have a bank account set up over there. Keeping everything separate. Any direction on this would be greatly appreciated. I know gym shark do it with the int domain but there are a number of questions I can't see answered on the topic. Cheers

[coleatkinson]

Hey Fritzle - settlements and payouts when using Shopify Payments multi currency are currently the same with international domains as they were previously. If you take orders in multiple currencies, Shopify will settle those orders into your chosen payout currency and include them in a single payout to one bank account. If you need to have multiple payouts into different bank accounts, in different countries and different currencies then yes, having separate storefronts at the moment is still required.

[zachgitti]

How does the different currency work? Does it automatically set it based on the exchange rate, or will we be able to set prices per domain/country?

[coleatkinson]

Using Shopify Payments multi currency feature, you can have Shopify automatically convert your prices based on the most up to date FX rate, or you can set your own manual exchange rates to control your pricing between currencies.

[Cez1]

I have been really disappointed with this for several reasons

Does not work with language apps

- The purpose of this is to target international audiences yet it is NOT compatible with any of the language apps. At the moment the language apps such as Langshop work via subdirectories ie /de for Germany. This clashes with the subdomains. So all of my translated pages cannot be opened on my subdomains. So it is completely useless! 

The URLS being created automatically have the format de.example.com/de and the double de is causing a clash and all my pages bring up 404 errors. 

I spoke with Langshop and they said 

"For now subdomain support is not yet added to Langshop. I'm afraid for now langshop works only with language URLs, not with domains. There's no hotfix or workaround until the support is released."

Still unable to localise URLS

For best SEO results we need to be able to translate the URL handles too. In Shopify's multilingual API URL handles are not translatable this really puts Shopify users at a disadvantage. My website used to be hosted on weebly, where this function was available and I was able to land in the top 3 search results for my keywords in 3 more languages. I have now lost all of that traffic because my pages do not even land on the first page anymore. We need to be able to translate page titles into the URL so that google can rank these pages higher. 

Unable to change the meta tags for SEO by subdomain 

At present it seems that it is not possible to update the meta tag for the different subdomains. So if you have a subdomain that is not in your main language (in my case English) I cannot edit the metatag of this subdomain so that it is in German/Spanish/French etc. The metatag is the little snippet of text that users see when searching for your website on search engines. You are not going to be able to bring in users who speak a different language if they cannot see on google what services/products etc your website features because it is not written in their language. Spoke to shopify, they said this wasn't available yet and spoke to langshop and they again stated that their app is not yet compatible with shopify subdomains. 

Currencies 

An additional mention although not a deal breaker. It would be really nice to be able to decide a set price for each currency, so it does not keep fluctuating depending on the currency conversion. Also means that if your profit margins are larger/smaller for different countries you can set your prices to correspond with this. 

I am disappointed because I not only paid to transfer my domain to shopify so that I could test this feature. I also paid to upgrade my Shopify plan (in my opinion the price jump is large and subdomains was the only benefit I could see to the plan change) 

I do not feel like this update should have been emailed out to users, and I should not have been encourage to upgrade my plan, when, in my opinion this service is far from ready to be in anyway useful to customers. 

If you have your website in just one language and you want to offer multiple currencies- save yourself the bother and just use a currency switcher and if you have multiple languages like me then the subdomains won't work yet for your translated pages. 

Unless Shopify makes some improvements it is not worth any additional stress/money/time. 

[coleatkinson]

Hey Cez1, thanks for your comments!

- We believe Langshop is currently in the process of updating in order to work well with the international domains feature. There are other translation apps available on the app store as well.

- At the moment we are looking at what other improvements we can make to the multi language experience before offering URL translations. With the vast majority of traffic coming from mobile devices where URLs are truncated, we believe there are other improvements we can leverage to have a greater impact on the multi language experience. When changing platforms, there are several reasons beyond this that you may see a temporary dip in organic ranking while Google relearns your new URL structures - with a sound redirect and migration strategy from Weebly or any other platform, this organic ranking should return.

- Shopify automatically generates hreflang tags for all international domains/subdomains, so this is not something you need to worry about. Additionally, sitemaps are generated for every domain, and sitemaps capture all locales published on a domain as well. Your comment about meta tags per domain is a valid one and something we are working towards. We do already do meta tags per language.

- Around your comment on currencies - we recently released the ability to control currency conversion through setting manual exchange rates. We are thinking about the next step and how we allow merchants to set individual prices in different currencies. 

[AMillionGoal]

I think having training on the international aspects of Shopify would be very useful since its a major topic that causes a lot of frustration. There are many ways of implementing what is being requested some better than others however I think the best way forward is as follows:

Let me summarise what everyone is trying to achieve

One Shop 

• Multiple DNS Domains
  • Each Domain Supports one or more countries
    • EU
    • UK Speaking (US, UK, CAD, AUS)
  • Each Domain has native language for local experience
  • Each Domain has local currency
• Currency Exchange USD -> Local Domain Currency

Clearly One Shop run by say an English Speaking person will need all text to either be translated on the fly or language templates to be duplicated.

How much of this is available today?

[coleatkinson]

Hi @AMillionGoal - you can achieve all of this today within a single Shopify store using Shopify Markets, which we just rolled out at the end of last week. Selling in local currencies is available but limited to shops that use Shopify Payments - everything else is available to all plans and gateways.

[Swematt]

Sorry for joining late. Three years into the topic.

Is this still valid: "If you need to have multiple payouts into different bank accounts, in different countries and different currencies then yes, having separate storefronts at the moment is still required." 
Let's say we have a German company SuperStore GmBH and a US subsidiary SuperStore US Inc. In order to sell from each company, do we still need to have two different Shopify accounts? We have that today, and it means double work for every SKU. 

[Tammy_Levasseur]

I’m looking to set up a warehouse in the US.  Can you share your process for locating a warehouse?  

[supsan]

Thanks for your interest in the feature! International domains doesn't change anything about the back end fulfillment functionality in Shopify - you can look at using Shipping Profilesto ensure that orders from certain countries only ship from locations/warehouses that you want them to.

Offering different products/content on different domains doesn't yet happen natively with this feature; you can reach out to a Shopify expert to customize such functionality for you in your theme, or you would continue to use multiple Shopify stores to do this.

Hey @coleatkinson , how would this work for products using Amazon FBA? Since it is not possible to select multiple warehouses and allow for international warehouses for those products, would sellers still need to use two separate stores?

[coleatkinson]

Hi @supsan - the solution we are developing is designed to work with multiple locations within Shopify. Using Amazon FBA does not leverage the native locations feature, so to do something like this with FBA would likely still require separate stores.

[fabmol1]

Hi

I am thinking about setting up international domains and I have a couple of questions:

1. If my base currency is EUR and I set up an international domain for the USA in USD. What currency does the customer checkout in?
2. My store is .com and based in Dublin, Ireland. What way would you set up a US store domain?
3. SEO - By having multiple domains for my store (.com, .ca, .co.uk), will this harm the SEO of my site in any way considering all our links are .com ?

Thanks

Fabio

[bigskyintl]

you said, "you can look at using Shipping Profiles to ensure that orders from certain countries only ship from locations/warehouses that you want them to."

> we have our shipping profiles set up with three different warehouses: USA, UK, and Asia and specified which country orders ship from what warehouse. For example: A Japan order will ship from our Asia warehouse. Unfortunately, there is a bug in the Shopify software that if inventory exists in a different warehouse, it will deduct from warehouse it should ship from even if no inventory exists, not from the warehouse that has the inventory. For example: Product "A" is not in stock in our Asia warehouse, but it is available in our UK warehouse. When we receive an order for Japan for Product "A" it will deduct inventory from our Asia warehouse even though it is NOT available in our Asia warehouse, and show a "negative" inventory value. Very frustrating since we have to tell our Japan customer item is not available, and cancel their order, then correct the "negative" inventory. (We do NOT have "Continue selling when out of stock" checked." Anyone know when Shopify plans to fix this issue?

[coleatkinson]

@bigskyintl thanks for raising this. This is absolutely something that we are committed to improving. Unfortunately I don't have a timeline right now but it is very much something we are aware of and working on.

[bigskyintl]

Any updates on fixing the issue for those of us using multiple warehouses/locations: bug in the Shopify software that if inventory exists in a different warehouse, it will deduct from warehouse it should ship from even if no inventory exists, not from the warehouse that has the inventory?

[bigskyintl]

Any updates on a solution for inventory being deducted when it should not be?

[mingyeungs]

I've read this thread and the documentations, but still aren't sure whether the subdomain is meant to be a region / language / currency / or a combo of all?

Let say I want to sell in 3 languages (EN, ZH-TW, ZH-CN) and accept 4 currencies (USD, HKD, TWD, SGD)

Should I set up: [www.myshop.com, tw.myshop.com, cn.myshop.com]? (language as subdomain)
or [www.myshop.com, hk.myshop.com, tw.myshop.com, sg.myshop.com]? (currency as subdomain)
or something else?

Moreover, some regions have multiple languages (e.g. Hong Kong uses EN and ZH-TW; Singapore uses EN and ZH-CN)
and some people prefers to checkout in a certain currency (e.g. a SG user browsing in ZH-CN and want to checkout using USD)

Essentially the questions boil down to:

#1. can one subdomain support multiple languages?
(if yes, what would the URL structure looks like? hk.myshop.com/zh-TW/, hk.myshop.com/en/ ?)

#2. can one subdomain support multiple currencies?

#3. can a language be used on multiple subdomains?

#4. can a currency be used on multiple subdomains?

Or is international domain not suitable for such use case?
Thanks in advance!

[Cez1]

I have done mine by location. 

So for example for Canada I would do the following 

ca.example.com 

(I personally have not seen a subdomain set up by currency before) 

For Canada I have the languages English and French set up (you do need to pick a default) but you can request that the first language shown is the same language in the user's browser. 

So on this subdomain the currency is CAD with two languages available and I also have a currency and language switcher set up just in case they wish to change. 

I have a few different languages on my store, but it is not recommended to add too many languages to each subdomain as this can negatively impact your SEO ranking. 

For each country I have set the default language to the native language of the country and I have included English always too, but I wouldn't suggest adding German or another language to the Canadian subdomain. 

Hope this helps! 

I have previously always used subdirectories, so I am waiting to see if it is worth spending the extra money on subdomains. Fingers crossed! 

p.s yes you can have the same language on different subdomains 

[mingyeungs]

Hi Cez1, thanks for sharing your experience! Would you mind sharing a little more?

1. With multiple languages in one site, how does the URL work?
- Do you have ca.example.com/en/ and ca.example.com/fr/?
- or do you have ca.example.com for FR, and ca.example.com/en/ for EN? (or wise-versa?)
- or are there only one URL ca.example.com , while the language is shown depending on user cookie/session?
- are there any flexibility in choosing the URL pattern?

2. Can multiple subdomains accept the same currency?
- Assuming you have ca.example.com and www.example.com , can they BOTH accept USD?

Thanks in advance!

[Cez1]

Sure!

The format I have is ca.example.com and this automatically opens my website in default English with CAD, then I have installed a language switcher incase they want to change to French, however if their browser language is in French it will display the website in French.

My languages are done via the app Langshop they are so helpful and can help you to set this up.

Your domain name is example.com

Everything in front of this is the subdomain so

www.
ca.
uk.

Are all examples of subdomains

Anything after the domain is a subdirectory

example.com/us

If you want you can just have subdirectories instead (this is the cheapest option) you create your languages and then use a language switcher which will change to /en /fr /de etc as the customer changes the language. This uses tags which helps google identify that your website is available in multiple languages

As far as I know the main benefit to subdomains is that these can be indexed as separate websites on google, thus improving your seo ranking internationally, but I have not had chance to see this yet as google indexing takes a few weeks.

I hope this helps!

[rohitmishra]

. Can multiple subdomains accept the same currency?

All domains are mapped to a country and its primary currency. So, you can have de.example.com, fr.example.com, nl.example.com etc mapped to Germany, France and Netherlands respectively. They will all have Euro as the default currency.

The only other exception is USD. You can have example.com or us.example.com mapped to United States (USD). You can also create a Rest of World domain like row.example.com and map that t Rest of World region. ROW region defaults to USD. 

[Art_JulieMiller]

My Store currency is ZAR (since I'm selling art from Africa) but my payout currency is USD since my business is in Canada.

If I use subdomains for different currencies for say USD & EURO, would client payments in those regions still be converted to ZAR before then being converted to USD for payout?

[coleatkinson]

Hey @Art_JulieMiller! No, only one conversion would take place from the currency that your customers buy in to your payout currency. And if a customer pays in USD and your payout currency is USD, there would obviously be no conversion.

[Art_JulieMiller]

YAYYYYY, thanks so much for your response. That makes me very happy 🙂

[Art_JulieMiller]

Just another thought if you don't mind indulging me - since my Store currency is in ZAR, would people paying in ZAR still pay a conversion fee for the payout in USD or does their credit card payment amount reflect what they see on the website?

[coleatkinson]

No - the only conversion that would take place in that scenario is from ZAR --> USD for your payout currency.

[Art_JulieMiller]

Thanks very much for your responses. It's hugely appreciated:)

[Dan_Delian]

Hi,

I am excited about this feature but have a few questions. I have two shopify sites at the moment in Australia and NZ. The AU one is the main one and I would like to combine if this option works well.

1 - How do the custom pages work once - do I make one page "examplepage1"and it will automatically create www.alkaviva.com.au /examplepage1 and www.alkaviva.co.nz / examplepage1

2 - will all the links i create automatically be made for the right page, ie will www.alkaviva.co.nz / examplepage1 links be for NZ pages only not to the original .au website

3 - will buyers in AU be able to buy on the .nz site? I would like to set the currency rate to keep pricing stable but don't want people to take currency 

4 - How would I use terms like Australia in the .com.au page and have them come up as New Zealand in the .co.nz pages

4 - 

[coleatkinson]

Hey @Dan_Delian!

1. Yes. When you create a page, that page and its contents are automatically created and accessible on all domains.

2. As in 1., when you create pages or content, that content is viewable on all domains. It's possible to conditionally display the content that appears on each domain using the {{ request.host }} liquid filter; this would require the input of a developer or Shopify Partner with working knowledge of liquid.

3. At the moment, buyers will be able to manually purchase from .co.nz/in NZD or .com.au/in AUD, regardless of where they are shipping their order to. We plan to make changes soon so that this does not happen at checkout, and buyers will only be able to checkout in the currency that matches their shipping location (if you choose to setup your currencies in such a manner).

4. Much the same as your second question, you can use the {{ request.host }} liquid filter to customize content that appears within a page on each domain for Australia and New Zealand.

[Dan_Delian]

Thanks,

Does that mean that if I have a link to a file or a product on the .Au site then the .nz site will still have the link to the .au site?

Regards,
Dan

www.alkaviva.com.au

[coleatkinson]

No. Unless you specifically hard code links into your theme, Shopify will always create your links as relative links, not absolute links.

For example, if you create a page with the URL handle /contact-us and place this page in your main navigation, a buyer browsing from Australia will navigate to website.com.au/pages/contact-us, and a buyer browsing from New Zealand will navigate to website.co.nz/pages/contact-us automatically. Both "Contact Us" pages will display the same content, unless you customize them with the {{ request.host }} filter I previously mentioned, which enables you to conditionally display different content based on the domain being visited

[Art_JulieMiller]

Hi there, another question please... 

This question is regarding Social Media sales channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest & Google, and how they work with International domains and/or Shopify Payments Multi-Currency support:

Does Shopify publish product prices to these channels in the currency of the user or does Shopify publish to these sales channels in the Store currency only?

Kind regards,

Julie

[coleatkinson]

Hey @Art_JulieMiller, Shopify's sales channels such as Facebook, Instagram and Google Shopping do not yet support multiple currencies; it is something we will be considering.

For remarketing your products in multiple currencies via mechanisms like the Facebook pixel, you can use a product feed app that supports multiple currencies, such as Data Feed Watch.

[coleatkinson]

Multiple Google Shopping feeds is another suggestion.

[Art_JulieMiller]

@coleatkinson thank you so much for your quick answers and your extensive knowledge on this topic. It certainly makes live much easier.

Kind regards,

Julie

[cool_kid1]

Hi there,

This thread is super helpful! Thank you!

However, on behalf of all people getting confused --including me-- on how to EVEN GET STARTED on having .de,.fr,.us etc.

Would you be kind enough to give us a step by step procedure using Shopify?

1) From what I've gathered, I need to buy new domain for each country? (shop.de, shop.fr, etc). Do I buy it from a 3rd party domain provider or does Shopify already gives that option?

2) I'm under the impression that this requires a separate Shopify store for each country? Then that's a huge workload. Unless I'm missing something.

3) Confused about how subdomain works on Shopify and how I can set it up. We are using Basic Shopify plan.

Looking forward to your kind response.

Sincerely

[coleatkinson]

Hi @cool_kid1! I think the answers to most of your questions are address in the steps provided in the international domains help docs:

1. You don't need to buy a new domain for each country - you can use this feature with subdomains if you wish to. If you have a domain purchased from Shopify, you can set up a subdomain directly within the admin (Online Store --> Domains --> Manage). If you're using a domain from a 3rd party, you will need to refer to their instructions to create this, and then you can connect it to Shopify.
2. If you do want to use top level domains for international targeting (e.g. website.com, website.ca, website.fr) then yes you would need to purchase these. You can do this directly in Shopify or with a 3rd party domain provider of your choice - either will work with this feature.
3. No, you do not need a separate store for each country. The idea of international domains is that you can expand internationally within a single store.

The international domains feature is only available to merchants on the Shopify plan or higher, so to see all the options we are talking about you would need to upgrade from Basic Shopify.

[cool_kid1]

I see now.
Thanks for that.

Then I guess I go for subdirectory method? I've read that somewhere on this thread as well.

Sorry mate, really confused here. Given the plan (basic) that we have and we really don't want to jump into an upgraded plan during this infant stage of our site.

We are so looking forward for workarounds on this. Cheaper yet effective. We'll surely dive into Shopify international domain once the budget is ready.

[coleatkinson]

Thanks @cool_kid1.

You cannot yet setup subdirectories to target different countries/region, but this is something we are looking into for the international domains feature.

If your site is in the early stages of growing, you can certainly add multiple domains into Shopify for now while growing your domestic presence, until such time where you are ready to make the jump into international domains later on. If you have the domains added, they will be ready to go if and when you make that jump later. If you don't, then you're unaffected.

In the meantime if your shop is using Shopify Payments, you can offer shopping in multiple currencies on the same domain for your international buyers, and then use our free Geolocation app to guide shoppers to the currency that matches their location on the storefront.

[danieltiffany]

I've set this up on a store recently, however I have a few SEO concerns. We're originally based in the UK on a .co.uk domain and we have set up a translated version in French on a .FR domain.

My biggest concern is with duplicate content as to use the Geolocation App we need the .co.uk store to also be available in French and the French store to also be available in English. This effectively creates 2 completely duplicate stores - the .CO.UK/FR site and the .FR site are exact duplicates and the .CO.UK and .FR/EN will be exact duplicates.

One possibility would be to make the English store only in English and the French store only in French however the Geolocation app does then not work - it returns a 404 rather than redirecting to the appropriate domain. So in conclusion we can set up a French site however if a French user lands on the UK site we have no way of redirecting these users to the French site.

Am I missing something here?

[coleatkinson]

Hey @danieltiffany, you certainly shouldn't need to have both languages published on both domain for this to work with the Geolocation app. I've forwarded this to our support team to take a closer look for you - they will be in touch!

[danieltiffany]

Hi @coleatkinson 

I haven't heard anything back on this I'm afraid so we still have to have both languages on both domains for this to work currently.

Did you manage to find out any more about this?

Thanks!

[booski360]

hey everyone, im also trying to link my US webpage to a UK website advertising program ... i am in review with rakuten advertising.. free to apply im so close to figuring this out.  they are a company that supplies merch to be sold such as shopify. i also had to go to this website called losant -Application tokens allow you to interact with a single application at a scope level you define. Using an application token, users can create, read, update or delete any child resource of the parent application – as well as the application itself.} these are some steps i had to take in order for my api to connect globally.l..

thanks you for your time. will give yall a update when i get updated 

Link Locator API Overview

The Link Locator API from the API Developer Portal provides you with information on advertisers in the Rakuten Affiliate Network and allows you to download different types of creative directly from the advertisers whose programs you participate in.

There are two different feeds available:

1. With the Advertiser Information Feed, you can receive information on advertisers in the Rakuten Advertising Affiliate Network—information such as advertiser name, category, offer name, and commission details—and use this to create and update a database.
2. With the Advertiser Creative Feed, you can download various kinds of links directly from the advertisers you're partnered with. The links can be accessed based on the creative category advertisers place them into and on the types of creative advertisers offer: link, banner, DRM, and so on.

Link Locator is provided by the Rakuten Advertising API Developer Portal. You can learn about its methods, resources, parameters, and other details in the Documentation tab of the link API listing. You have the ability to test the Web Service in the Portal through the Try It tab. Please review the "Getting Started Guide" to understand the end-to-end process from creating an application to making an API request with your new access token. This along with other helpful resources can be found in the footer of the portal.

[booski360]

https://youtu.be/nPFc0CtB9bo

a link to help with this ongoing question our community is looking for

[booski360]

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/10/devtools?utm_source=devtools#moveable-tools

[booski360]

update