[Shopify Markets] Checkout allows currency other than that set in the Shopify Market

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Topic summary

Issue: Checkout currency could differ from the market set for the shipping address, complicating Subscriptions that rely on market identification. Shopify Markets defines regional settings (like default currency) per country/region, but subscriptions lacked a reliable market identifier, forcing a fallback to shipping address.

Reproduction example (Fabuwellness): While browsing in the Ireland market (EUR), users could enter a UK shipping address and still be charged in EUR instead of GBP. A GIF attachment documented steps. A second store (The Rotten Fruit Box) often corrected currency on address change, but inconsistencies were observed.

Impact: Many merchants experienced mismatched currencies at checkout, making accurate subscription setup/modification difficult and potentially incorrect.

Recent update: No official fix was communicated. However, the original steps no longer reproduce the issue; it may have been silently patched. The merchant also migrated to the single-page checkout, which could have influenced behavior.

Status: Unconfirmed resolution; no explicit guidance from Shopify. Key open question: whether enforced currency-market alignment at checkout is guaranteed going forward.

Summarized with AI on December 22. AI used: gpt-5.
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This is a bit of a followup / addition to a recent unanswered post about Markets and Subscriptions. I couldn’t find another, better category or board for this post so if one exists please let me know and I’ll move it.

The previous post I wrote was about the lack of identification of a market in subscriptions, making it impossible to accurately enable subscription modifications when a merchant is using Markets. As a result we had to resort to using the shipping address (when one exists) and that works for a majority of merchants’ subscriptions. But there’s still a very large number that it doesn’t work for because Shopify lets customers check out with shipping addresses and currencies that do not coincide with any market they set up. I’ll give an example:

Fabuwellness sells its products globally (100s of countries) but predominately in Ireland and the UK. Ireland has a market set up and that market’s currency is EUR, and the UK similarly has a market but with its currency in GBP. However, it’s very easy to be in the Ireland market (because the online store defaults to the Ireland market) and checkout with a shipping address in the UK but still be charged in EUR. So even though I’m physically in the UK and I set my shipping address to an address in the UK, I’m charged in a currency from a different market. This seems like it shouldn’t be possible. I screen grabbed myself running through the steps to replicate (see attached GIF) but here they are as well:

  1. open this product page on Fabuwellness
  2. ignore/close the modal that asks if you want to change markets
  3. scroll to the bottom of the page and in the market selector/dropdown select Ireland (EUR)
  4. Select the Subscribe & Save option (not sure this part really matters) and then click Add to cart
  5. You’re brought to the cart page, then click “Checkout”
  6. Note that the Order Summary on the right is in euros
  7. Enter an email address and a shipping address in the UK (ex 123 Buckingham Palace Road, London, SW1W 9SR, United Kingdom)
  8. Click Continue to Shipping
  9. Note that it’s still in euros
  10. Click Continue to Payment
  11. See that if you were to checkout that you’d be paying in Euros still even though you’re checking out and shipping to the UK

markets-screen-grab.gif

I’d love to know if this is a bug, an expectation or some edge case (though I don’t think it is because many of our merchants have the exact same issue). If it’s the way we should expect checkout to work, then it makes using Markets for Shopify Subscriptions impossible for many subscriptions that seem to be getting charged for and set up in an incorrect currency. The reason it seems likely to be a bug is that in a majority of cases, after you update the shipping address the checkout refreshes and updates the currency to match the one set in the Shopify Market that address exists in. An example of this working fairly consistently is The Rotten Fruit Box. Change your market to a non-UK market then try to checkout with a UK address and you’ll see the currency get updated (though we’ve seen incorrect currencies there too)

Any help or guidance would be appreciated! It’s frustrating for our merchants that we can’t support their usage of Shopify Markets.

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Hey @Brian_S_1 have you sorted out this issue? We’ve ran into the same issue and couldn’t find the solution for this.

If you have found the solution, it’d be appreciated if you can share us your experience. Thanks!!!

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No solution was ever communicated to me but the exact steps I listed previously no longer lead to the same issue.. so perhaps it was patched. Also - they switched to the single page checkout so maybe that changed something