Separate store for each country Vs. One store with international domains Feature

[Zaflow123]

I'm trying to find the best way to optimize conversion in my store for each country, my company is located in Canada and I sell in Canada and USA right now, and I will expand to more countries but not right now.  I need your opinion.

Should I stay on one-store for both countries with the Shopify standard plan and use multi-domains and Shopify multi-currency payments? or

should I open a separate store with identical products, dedicated to each country?

Currently I'm trying out the One-store-two-countries option on the Shopify standard plan and use multi-domains and Shopify multi currency payments, I upgraded from the Shopify basic for one month to try out the new features.

Here are some things that make me consider going for two separate stores, each one optimized for a specific country:

- I like that I can set the pricing in each currency and set shipping rates in the same currency with the capability of having a specific threshold in free shipping under a certain amount in the same currency, this was difficult to accomplish because of currency exchange rates. 

I would have to tell a US customer that the order will ship for free if its $47.50 USD or more, just because my threshold for free shipping for Canada is $60 CAD or vice versa, it is not ideal, because shipping is expensive in Canada and I can provide better rates for US customers, to match the competition, where in Canada Free shipping threshold tend to be higher. 

I like that I can dedicate specific inventory levels to each store, and I use syncing software for this, which syncs my quantities across many channels and marketplaces, so this would be more accurate for each country,

With one store, I might sell something in one country and have to ship it to another because of availability, it is not ideal because the shipping costs will increase and the estimated time will be longer and not match the custom expectations. This would be a major headache especially when sales increase (which is the goal).

Here are things that makes me hesitant to try 2 separate stores for the same products:

I dislike that I have to maintain two stores, 2 login, 2 settings, blog posts, categories, policies etc.. I have to remember to do everything twice, and have double the problems and glitches to test and check

I dislike that I have to pay for every app 2 times

I dislike that I have to use geolocation app to direct people from one domain to another, especially that 2 domains will be competing with each other now, and I might have to set it up for google, I'm not sure if this is easy to do, but I would imagine its doable but not easy.

I dislike that I would have to be really committed in order  to even try this option because its a lot of work to setup a Shopify from scratch

I dislike having to think about moving back or changing domains in the future to combine them back into one store if it ever comes to that

[ThomasKyoto]

We are selling on 3 different stores, with the same products, but different language and this is fine for us.

-You need just one Shopify account to access all your Shopify admin. Easy and fast.
-Our home page isn't always the same because we don't do the same promotions depending on where our customers are. (ex: Mother's day isn't the same in every country).
Happy to give you more info if you need!

[Lleo]

I’d love to know how to run different sites with one Shopify account. I need to have to different domains one for US and one UK. Different free shipping thresholds and different promotions at different times. E.g. just had Labour Day weekend in US.

[ThomasKyoto]

You can create multiple stores, using one Shopify account (one email) so it makes it easy to switch between them.

But there's no sync between them. You'll need an app to synchronize inventories if you sell the same SKU on different shop.
You'll need to setup your themes, etc.

[leyadoll]

Just happen to see this article, I have a similar problem here. Need your help : ) 

We sell in over 5 countries including UK, US, CA... And we're now using 'currency convert in vitals app' & 'shopify payment' to support the multi-currency based on user's IP.

But it's difficult to set shipping rates because only USD is supported in shopify shipping profile.

For example i set free-shipping over 50 USD amount (about equals to 36.15 GBP), it's not easy to tell UK users about this, with no rounding expression.

And the most difficult part is when the market currency rate float, sometimes a same order for example in 49.99 USD will be paid-shipping , but become free-shipping when it switched to GBP. 

Do you have any advice here ? 

[MackJon]

Hi,

I went from running 3 stores to one this year. Maintaining the three was getting too much, so I wanted to take advantage of multi-currency, local-pricing, multi-language, with two 3PLs doing distribution. Overall, I wanted to create something that scales as we're probably going to open new markets in the forthcoming years, and I didn't want to have 8 sites to manage!

Single site for everything? It is possible, but there are a lot of hurdles and restrictions. 

• It sounds like you'll be ok as you don't mind it happening, but currently there is no way except through explicit shipping policies to stop stock being shipped from any available warehouse - even if the warehouse can't ship there. However, I have a post about this and I know Shopify is working on it. 
• Multi-currency - by using local pricing, you can explicitly set the price of all products per country, then you can set shipping policy to do rounding and set it for each shipping region. Basically, you can achieve orders under (for example) £50 is £4.95 for the UK and under €50 is €4.95 for the EU - with free shipping for the rest. 
• My main unknown was two 3PLs sharing a single account (they would get all the orders). Turns out this was easy as most allow tags to dictate the orders they pick up and ship.
• My current main issue is many apps just can't handle multi-currency. This basically means I'm back to using Shopify discounts to do every offer now, and you can only work with percentages. Offering €10 off is an obscure amount in £ and I'm not calculating it each time. 
   - Equally, you'll find many apps don't even display the multi-currency format. So I'm currently having to refresh all my search filter apps, find new offers apps and manually fix the theme myself (which I paid £150 last year and is still listed on the Shopify Themes page) because the developer can't figure out how to fix it. 

I could go on, but that's a few pointers to anyone looking at doing this. It can be done, when it works it does work -  but all the time I spent saving maintaining 3 sites is not spent trying to maintain all the new intricacies of 1 very complicated site.

I'm hoping this Shopify Markets will make a huge difference. 

Jon