How to translate Shopify New Marketing Email Automations

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Topic summary

Shopify’s new Marketing Email Automations (for abandoned carts, product browsing, welcome emails, etc.) lack proper multilingual support, preventing merchants from translating automated sections for international customers.

Core Issues:

  • Product titles, “Recover Cart” buttons, and other automated sections display only in the store’s primary language
  • Links don’t respect customer locale properties
  • Footer elements like “unsubscribe” text remain untranslatable
  • Shopify Inbox doesn’t pass correct locale properties during customer creation

Workarounds Identified:

  • Use conditional “if” statements in workflows based on customer.locale to create separate emails per language
  • Apply filters in automation workflows using customer locale (e.g., filtering for “es” for Spanish)
  • Utilize custom Liquid emails as suggested in Shopify’s documentation
  • Add customer.locale steps in Shopify Flow to route customers to language-specific email templates (see attached workflow screenshot)

Current Status:
Despite promises from Shopify developers in February that multilingual features were “coming soon,” the issue persists as of mid-2024. Multiple merchants express frustration that this limitation makes email automation “completely useless” for international stores, creating unnecessary friction for global selling.

Summarized with AI on October 31. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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I have been trying to contact again the shopify support because one of the developers team wrote to me an email in mid-February that these features were coming soon…

Now it is mid-May and still nothing, we could get so much more brand awareness and consideration with these multilingual features applied to the new email automations.

Come on Shopify!

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