Best layout to direct CANADA customers and US customers to separate Shopping areas?

I am a wholesaler looking to direct Canadian customers to a certain list of products and US to another. Is there a better (preferably FREE) design that I should be looking at? More like a portal to enter

Hi @NorthwestFudge ,

Thank you for getting in touch. Our new Markets feature is one you might wish to consider, as it allows merchants to target different countries and customer bases with regionalized settings (such as separate domains, languages, and currencies). I would recommend looking looking into using Markets as you’re selling to customers in both Canada and the United States.

It is worth noting that even when using Markets, you’ll still have the same website and products listed that can be viewed by customers in both countries. You could decide to use different shipping profiles to differentiate between products you’re selling to Americans and those you’re selling to Canadians; in each profile you could add the products for each country, and then only adding shipping rates for US-based customers and vice-versa. This means, for example, that customers in Canada could view the products available to those in the United States, but could not have them shipped to a Canadian address. This may be an issue if you don’t wish to advertise products to customers who can’t purchase them.

An alternative solution which may work better is using a wholesale app, of which there are many on the Shopify App Store. You can use one of these apps to offer products to curated customer lists (with different prices, if you wish), and you should be able to easily manage your products that can be sold to either American or Canadian customers respectively.

One final suggestion would be to have two separate Shopify stores for each audience. This would allow you to have two different storefronts with different products on each, and you’d generally have more control of how you target customers in each country. However, this would mean that you’d have two separate admins where you can manage your products, orders, and customers, and you’d also be paying for two Shopify subscriptions. I think using a wholesale app would be a better option but it is something you may want to consider.

I hope my suggestions are of some use but please let me know if you require any further help.

1 Like

Hi @Victor_5 I’m looking for a solution to something similar but not for wholesale. Because our product has different packaging and due to compliancy we can only say some things in Canada and other things in the USA on our website, if we setup Shopify Markets and us the geolocation app to separate the domain as well, is there anyway to make the website change when the domain changes? We have product images of our Canadian packaging we wouldn’t want our US customers to see and copy that is different etc.

I would love to know what other CPG/food brands do for US and Canada. Also if we were to have two Shopify stores, one for each country how would marketing work on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Google? We only have one ads account for each of these platforms. I also am unsure how our website would show up in Google search if someone typed in our brand. Would both websites show up? our .ca and .com?

Hi @thegummyproject ,

Shopify Markets allows you to set a variety of different options for customers in numerous regions, including which languages, currencies, and prices are on display. However, if you are looking for your website to differ in terms of wording and text for customers in different countries, this is something you’d need multiple storefronts for at this time, or you could set up a custom solution using coding. In future having custom content for different countries may be possible through Shopify Markets, but for now the best workaround is a set up using Liquid that is outlined on the Shopify Blog.

In terms of your marketing, you could still push customers to your main .com address unless that content was aimed primarily at Canadian customers, in which case you could direct them to your .ca domain and site. I believe you can connect multiple stores to single ad accounts for the various social media platforms you’ve listed, but this is something you’d want to check on a case-by-case basis.

It is possible to have both of your domains appear in search results, and if you have multiple stores, then you can tailor each store’s content in a way to optimize your SEO. For example, for your Canadian store, if you use Canada-specific keywords on that site, your .ca domain will be more likely to appear in search results for Canadian customers over time. This is a form of geotargeting. I’d recommend checking out this Google developers article for more information on multi-regional sites.

I hope this has helped, but pelase let me know if you’ve any further questions.