subfolder domain for primary market & .com domain for international market: why not possible???

[interiorexpert]

Hi,

we would like to change the setup for our domains and use .com for the international market and .com/de-de for our primary market Germany. But it seems that it is not possible. The shop's main domain .com is connected by Shopify in a fix way to the primary market. Does anyone have a solution for that problem?

At the moment there are only 3 solutions that I see, but I don't like any of theme:

1. Change default language for the primary market to English. Then I can create a subfolder for German .com/de. For the international market we can use .com/en-en. That's obviously not a good solution, because German speaking people should see German content first.

2. Continue using .com for the German market and use .com/en-en for the international market. Our SEO expert doesn't like that solution.

3. Set up a different shops for Germany with .de domain and an international shop with .com. 

Why is it not possible to use the .com domain for the international market and to use a subfolder for the primary market?

Best

Thomas

[nicolathomps]

Hi @interiorexpert - unfortunately no suggestions from my side, but I was wondering if you solved this yourself in the past few weeks? And if so, which solution you went with.

Thanks!

[interiorexpert]

Unfortunately it's not possible... The Shopify support suggested the following:

"(...) you will need to change your primary domain to .de which will then be set for Germany. Afterwards, you will need to set a subfolder for the .com to your international market."

We will probably go for the solution to use .com for the German market and use .com/en-en for the international market...

[levidaragiu]

Same issue here. We sell electric tricycles and our main market would be Germany, then Romania, then, other European countries. I assigned a subdomain for this Shopify store called shop.amr-elektro.com
The issue is that being a .com domain, I can't seem to find any workaround to set that to the EU market as a region/as a whole. Apparently, you have to assigned that .com PRIMARY domain/subdomain to a COUNTRY. You can't select a region to target. That's VERY unfortunate as I needed to create subfolders for the German and Romanian markets. I think it also has everything to do with the currency as that poses the main problem for Shopify since they wouldn't be able to track sales per country...EU being a region. Dunno...that's MY interpretation.

But anyways...it's SUCH a bummer because Shopify support doesn't seem to understand or know how to solve this thing. What's really frustrating is that I cannot start designing the store and working on the products due to the uncertainty of these settings that could mess everything.

It's also such a pain in the butt to change the primary market and then try to figure out the structure of a multi market store.