Shopify merchants are frustrated by an automated feature (reportedly introduced in late 2023) that forces checkout currency to match the shipping address rather than the billing address or customer location.
Core Issue:
Customers sending gifts internationally must pay in the recipient’s currency, not their own
Example: A UK customer shipping to Germany is forced to pay in EUR; a Japan-based customer shipping to Spain must pay in EUR
Business Impact:
Particularly problematic for gift-oriented businesses
Merchants report daily customer complaints and lost sales
No advance notification was provided about this change
Merchant Requests:
Ability to disable this automation or switch to billing address-based currency
Option for customers to choose their preferred payment currency at checkout
Currency/payment gateway control based on customer IP address with manual override capability
Current Status: The issue remains unresolved, with multiple merchants calling for Shopify to address this across various platforms. No official response or workaround has been provided.
Summarized with AI on October 25.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
Why oh why does Shopify think that changing currency based on shipping address is a good idea?! This automation (seemingly switched on in late 2023 from what I can gather) means that a UK customer cannot send a gift to a German friend without paying in Euros, just because we have the tenacity to offer Euros as a payment method for German customers.
What insane short-sightedness led to this decision? Why weren’t we told, and just left to find out via our customer’s wrath? Why can’t we choose to turn this off, or make it work via billing address?
We’re a highly giftable company and we’re losing customers daily who email in asking why they’re billed in the shipping address currency and not billing address currency.
Same here. A large number of my sales are gifts. I’ve been telling my customers that they can decide which currency to pay in. That is the modern way and what I expect when shopping. This is infuriating on many levels.
Same here. We have many customers who send gifts to countries other than their own.
But even aside from that, when you sell worldwide, it’s not unusual for customers in one country to want to pay in a different currency — for many different reasons.
Shopify team, please fix this. Enough people are mentioning it across the web for you to take it seriously. I don’t see any valid reason to force checkout currency based on the shipping country — it really doesn’t make sense.
Very concerning, also in Markets you cannot offer local 3rd party payment gateways.
Payment gateways and default currency should be controlled by merchant for each market based on customer IP address. If the customer changes their country from the country selector, then gateways and default currency must change automatically. And at checkout, customers should have the option of changing the default currency.
