How can I expand my online store to the US without creating a second store?

How can I expand my online store to the US without creating a second store?

WuliGrooming
Visitor
1 0 0

 

Hi all, I have a question to ask any shopify store owners who sell in more than 1 country.

I launched my brand a few months ago in my native Australia (https://www.wuligrooming.com)), and I‘m now exploring the possibilities of opening orders to the US market.

My store is still relatively new and the main reason I want to open access to the US because I have had several people inquire about ordering over there. Global shipping being what it is currently, I don’t want to ship products direct to customers from Australia, rather I’m looking to work with a 3PL like ShipBob to warehouse inventory in the US and then ship from there.

I’ve looked into the idea of basically duplicating my store and creating a US version with localised pricing but I feel this much effort is way too early in my journey with all the additional costs required to maintain what is effectively two stores.

Has anyone setup sales access for their store in a separate country without having to create a second store. I know if I did this properly (i.e. create a US-based store), it would also require its own marketing and sales push for real success and I just don’t have that capacity. I basically just want the option to have US customers visit my site, purchase goods and have it then shipped via ShipBob.

Would greatly appreciate any feedback!

Reply 1 (1)

Victor
Shopify Staff
2611 236 556

Hi @WuliGrooming,

 

Expanding into a new market can always be daunting and there's plenty of considerations you need to make when doing so. This is something you can do with either a single store or multiple ones, and I'll outline the pros and cons of doing it each way below.

 

Shopify Markets is a relatively new feature on Shopify that aims to make selling internationally easier for merchants. You can use Markets to set up things such as allowing customers to view prices in their currency of choice as well as offering region-specific domains. This means your American customers could shop your store in USD while visiting the .com version of your website.

 

Shopify also allows you to add different locations and set different shipping rates for customers in different countries, so it'd be possible for you to assign specific products to your US location and charge them different shipping rates in comparison to your Australian ones.

 

You can also use Markets to set up individual prices for different markets, although please be aware that this feature is only available to merchants on the Advanced and Plus plans. If you are not on one of these plans already, it might be more financially viable to have two seperate stores rather than a single store on one of these higher plans. This might be recommendable if your plan on changing your prices for the US market in comparison to Australia. 

 

It sounds like operating from a single store would probably be the best option for you given that you aren't looking to focus on a US-centric marketing campaign, and I imagine that you wouldn't require your storefront to look different for American and Australian audiences. As mentioned, however, if you are not on the Advanced or Plus plans then you would not be able to have different price points for each market (although you can still enable price rounding so your AUD prices are rounded when converted to USD).

 

I hope this helps but please let me know if you'd like to discuss this further.

Victor | Social Care @ Shopify 
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