I am trying to consolidate two sites it a single site via Shopify Markets. Right now I have seperate CA + US site, the goal would be to have the as a single site. The idea is that the structure of the site would be the same, but we would provide content localizations via the translate and adapt app.
The need is to split the site into two seperate sub-folders via shopify markerts: /en-ca and /en-us. It seems like I was able to acheive this but I have questions.
How do I control what is the default domain? E.g. if the user navigates to the root, what is the subdomain which will be chosen?
Is there any SEO or canonical implications I need to wary of? SEO is a priorty.
What is the best way to acheive this?
Basically, I have setup 2 Markets (one for US, one for Canada) and created a single subfolder for each. I have not selected “primary” for either market. e.g. Canada:
Your Q1 is answered by the thing you skipped: you haven’t set a primary market, and the primary market is what serves the root. In Shopify Markets one market owns the root domain and the others sit in subfolders, so you can’t leave both /en-us and /en-ca as pure subfolders with something neutral at the root, whichever you mark primary is what a visitor to the bare domain gets.
When I setup using two sub folders and no primary, and I hit the root, i am still redirected to /en-us but i dont know why this is happening if i didnt set a primary. So it seems as if I can have both /en-ca and /en-us but I dont know what I am missing.
If this is a requirement to have both /en-ca and /en-us instead of /en-ca and / (us at the root). What’s the best way to acheuive this?
The behavior you’re seeing comes from how Shopify treats the primary market. There’s always exactly one primary market, and that market is the one served at your root domain with no subfolder prefix - only your secondary markets get the /en-us, /en-ca folders. So ‘what loads at the root’ isn’t really unset; it’s whichever market is primary. Set the market you want as your global default to be the primary one, and the root will serve that.
Separately, Shopify also runs a geolocation-based recommendation - it can nudge or redirect a visitor to their local market based on where they are. That’s a different mechanism from which market owns the root URL, and it’s the part that makes the root feel like it’s ‘choosing’ a folder.
On SEO, the good news is this setup is safe by design: for subfolder markets Shopify automatically outputs hreflang alternate tags and per-market canonical URLs, so /en-us and /en-ca won’t cannibalize each other as duplicate content - as long as the content actually differs. Since you’re localizing with Translate and Adapt, make sure each market has genuinely adapted content rather than identical copy, or the split adds little. The root geolocation redirect is a soft suggestion rather than a hard 301, so Google can still crawl each subfolder directly. Shopify’s Markets manual is worth a read for the exact canonical behavior: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/markets
1. Set one market as Primary in Setting > Markets, that’s what serves at the root domain.
2. Yes, ensure hreflang tags auto-generate correctly per subfolder, canonicals self-reference (not pointing to root) and submit each subfolder as seperate sitemap/GSC property. Avoide forced geo-redirect (hurts crawling)
3. Set Primary market, use soft geolocation banner (not forced redirect), verify hreflang/canonical tags live, use translate & adapt for content only, not duplicate catalogs.
That’s an important point. The primary market determines what visitors see when they land on the root domain, so if no primary market is set, the behavior can be confusing.
If the goal is to keep both /en-us and /en-ca as subfolders while serving a neutral homepage at the root, Shopify Markets doesn’t currently support that structure out of the box. The root domain must belong to one primary market.
If having a neutral landing page is a requirement, you may need to consider a custom implementation or a separate storefront, depending on how much localization and SEO flexibility you need.
The main decision is whether you actually need a neutral root. Shopify Markets always wants one market to own /, so if SEO is the priority I’d usually make the strongest/default market the primary root and put the other market in a subfolder.
If you force everyone from / into /en-us or /en-ca, that’s where crawling can get messy. Keep canonicals self-referencing, let hreflang connect the US/CA versions, and avoid hard geo-redirects for Googlebot/users.
If the business requirement is truly “nothing lives at / and both markets must only be /en-us + /en-ca”, that’s not really the clean native Shopify Markets path — you’re into custom routing or a different architecture.
