If you were a store owner wanting to sell your products or services in different parts of the world, you use to need to create multiple “expansion” stores, one for each country. This meant that if you wanted to sell cross-border and take your brand international, it would require a lot of time and effort to sync your catalogue, inventory, apps, and themes across stores.
That’s why we’ve created Shopify Markets!
With Shopify Markets, you can identify, set up, launch, optimize, and manage your international sales—all from a single store. What’s more, with Shopify Markets you’re not limited to individual countries. You can set up shopping experiences and strategies for whole groups of countries.
So how and why would you create Markets for different geographic locations or countries?
Here’s a sample case:
Imagine you run a store in Ireland called YourStore. You primarily sell to the United Kingdom, the United States and European countries Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
Because the United States and the United Kingdom are non-EU, English-speaking countries, you create a UK-US market so that your store is accessible through the YourStore.com domain. You do this by going to Settings > Markets > Add a Market. Because your store’s default language is English, that is the language for this market.
In order to fully activate this Market, you need to make sure you have set up shipping rates for all countries/regions that you have added to that market:
With that done, you will also want to set up a market for Germany, France, Italy and Spain. Following the same process, add the countries to a designated European market.
What’s great about Shopify Markets is that you know that you can now sell in up to 20 languages from a single store. So your French, German, Italian and Spanish customers can each visit your store and they do not have a language hurdle to jump. This is super handy because 40% of customers won’t even consider buying from a store in another language!
So you go to Settings > Languages and make sure to Add a Language for German, French, Italian and Spanish. With those added, you can then pop back into Settings > Markets and click “Manage” next to your European market. You do this because you now need to link the language to the domains for each country that you create.
In other words, you’re ensuring that your German customers can reach your site through YourStore.com/DE. And that your Italian customers can reach your site through YourStore.com/it, and so on.
Do bear in mind that in order to display your theme in different languages, you need a theme that’s compatible with selling in multiple languages. All the free themes from Shopify are compatible. You might need to update your theme for it to be compatible with selling in multiple languages. If you’re using a third-party theme, then you can contact your theme developers to check if it’s compatible.
Your theme will also need a language selector. If your theme doesn’t have one, you could use the Geolocation app by Shopify, which will automatically recognize where your customer is coming from and present them with language options.
In order to translate your content, you will need a compatible third-party translation app to translate your content or follow the instructions to import your translations directly into Shopify.
To set up localized domains and languages, you want to click “Manage” next to Domains and languages, followed by “Domain or SubDomain”, where you will be able to click each language you want to be included in that Market to be assigned to each subdomain.
If your store is on the Advanced Plan, and you meet the requirements, you can also ensure that your customers are charged the right taxes and duties! This is especially useful for customers who are not in the European Union.
And if you use Shopify Payments, you can also:
- Let your customers pay in their domestic currency,
- You can accept local payment methods,
- You’ll enjoy price rounding,
- You’ll be able to see product price breakdowns.
The Bottom Line:
Tailoring the online shopping experience for different customers around the world is one of the most important steps towards success in your brand. It will help you distinguish yourself from your competitors and it will help you connect with buyers who might otherwise be unreachable.
If you’ve invested time and energy in building a business that deserves to be shared far and wide, then you cannot let borders stand in your way. We understand this, which is why Shopify Markets allows you to go further and connect with more people, without having to spend more or spread yourself too thin. Shopify Markets is your ticket to localizing domains, languages, currencies, pricing, taxes, duties, and local payment methods for each market to ensure the optimum customer experience.
