Global expansion, localizing content, and selling in multiple currencies and languages
Shopify merchants can now assign individual domains to a country/region. This allows you to offer a default currency and language (or set of language options) on individual domains in order to provide a localized browsing experience to your buyers all around the world. This feature is available to merchants on Shopify, Shopify Advanced, and Shopify Plus plans.
For example, let’s say you are a merchant based in the United States, currently selling both within the US and to Canada on your website shop.com. You can now:
When using international domains and multiple languages, Shopify automatically handles all hreflang and SEO best practices to give your site the best chance of being indexed regionally by search engines. If a buyer happens to land on the wrong domain, you can provide on site currency and language recommendations using the Geolocation app.
International domains rely on merchants selling in multiple currencies with Shopify Payments, and to offer multiple languages you must offer translations via a compatible 3rd party translations app.
NOTE: Merchants are responsible for adding their own top level domains (TLDs) or subdomains for use with this feature. International domains does not alter the domain purchasing flow or guarantee the availability of new domains for you to purchase.
Resources
If you have any questions or feedback about this new feature reply below as we’d love to hear from you. If you looking for troubleshooting support please get in touch with our support team, or create a new topic providing as much detail as possible.
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hello Cole,
We're expanding across Europe with international domains, using www.ogglio.org as our main domain, then redirecting the customers to www.ogglio.de etc.) based on their location. I've just downloaded the Geolocation App but it's not working. It does not let me do anything: I cannot access "Recommendations" or "Selectors", I can only click on a button that says "Learn more" but that's not what I need, as it send me around on a loop. Can you or one or your colleagues look into this? Maybe the App need to be unlocked somehow? Please let me know, many thanks, Giuseppe
Hi @OGGLIO, in this case it would be best to speak to our support team - this sounds like something simple within your setup that our team can take a look at (we don't have access to your store from the forum).
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hi Cole,
This definitely looks interesting. I have a couple of questions regarding this feature (as we are assessing to provide our store in multiple new regions and languages).
1. Can we enable/disable products on specific stores - eg. a product is available in the US, but not available in Canada (could be for legal or operations reasons)
2. The domains dont really need to be ISO code of the country right? We can have a can.shop.com for canada (for example)?
3. Can we have different content of US English and Canada English for a product description or a page?
Hi @hardfire,
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hi there, hoping for a little help with our decision wether to create a new store or use an international domain (or if that is initial premise is flawed and that creating an international domain is the same as creating a new Shopify store...)
We are an established store based in the UK. However we do have a sizeable amount of international sales coming primarily from the US.
The non-UK experience is powered by Global-e and we would like to move away from this for US traffic.
We would like to have a US store e.g. us.our-site.com that we can tailor as needed and importantly use Shopifys native checkout experience.
We would want the US store to have the same products and not having to merchandise them separately would be ideal.
In the longer term that it would be good to have US specific copy or creative for US traffic.
Hi @ajmarriage thanks for your message.
What are you using with Global-e today that is essential for you to sell into the US?
It's absolutely correct that you can have separate domains that target different countries/regions within a single Shopify store, and the control the pricing for each market with international pricing. These features are currently contingent on the use of Shopify Payments, so if you are already using SP or would consider using it, we can definitely help you with this transition.
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hi @coleatkinson,
Thanks for all of the useful info on this thread. I have a few more questions that I am hoping you can help me with:
Thanks!
Hi @Gaelle1, great questions thank you!
Hope this helps!
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Expanding the business internationally is a very big and recent technique to augment the reach of your business and this is something every online shop owner should do to hit the different types of demographic of people and increase the reach of your business. I will also suggest you use your .com address to hit your local area community and then use your .co.UK domain to target the peoples all over the World. You can do this with international domains and Shopify Payment method.
Hi @coleatkinson , is it possible to restrict certain products on different domains? Or specifically if a customer has chosen they want to ship to say Australia, the store only shows those products which are able to be shipped to Australia?
You can control the availability of content per domain with the request.host liquid filter in your theme files. This would require knowledge of liquid to implement, however we are working on making this a more native process.
You can use shipping profiles to ensure that only the products that are available to certain countries can be shipped there.
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hey @datomnz yes absolutely, it will work for any content.
You can see a very basic example on our demo store's contact page:
https://uk.defaultglobal.com/pages/contact-us versus
https://defaultglobal.com/pages/contact-us versus
https://defaultglobal.ca/pages/contact-us
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hey everyone, for everyone following this thread we're happy to let you know that automatic redirection between international domains is now available: https://community.shopify.com/c/Selling-Internationally/Automatically-redirect-customers-to-the-righ...
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hi Cole,
We use global-e to set country specific pricing - importantly including the duty and tax as part of the price.
We currently have Shopify Payments setup, so good on that side of things.
Would we be able to set the prices in the same manner as global-e with the taxes and duty included?
Hi Cole,
Excellent thread, thanks for new features and info.
For somebody looking to sell Print-on-Demand items from different suppliers to different regions (e.g supplier A only serves UK, supplier B only serves USA) what are the different ways that this could be set up?
Many Thanks
Hey @John2021, thanks for jumping on and great question, thank you.
I'd suggest arranging your products for each supplier into their own collections. You can then show/hide collections and product based on which domain the user is browsing in one of two ways:
Coding this into your theme using request.host yourself if you have developer resources or don't wish to use an app.
You can then use Shipping Profiles to only offer shipping on each product from each supplier to the relevant countries that they are offered.
Hope this helps.
Cole
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hi Cole,
Thank you, that is helpful and the app looks good.
I just have a couple more questions on this:
Can I set up a sub-domain for each different country: e.g france.mystore.com, USA.mystore.com and have a different product selection, using the app, on each store? Or do I need separate domains e.g mystore.fr, mystore.com etc..?
Do I need to have a separate Shopify account for each country (whether using sub-domains or separate) or could I have just one account with these different domains?
Many Thanks
Hey @John2021, with some work you could do all of this from one store with the Locksmith app. You wouldn't need separate Shopify stores; you could use international domains within a single shop using either mystore.fr or fr.mystore.com, it is your preference.
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hi Cole,
We did setup multiple stores for different markets to handle different pricing, taxes and marketing.
Some of this stores have multiple languages and multiple domains based on language settings.
Therefore I need to setup the hreflang links properly to include all store domains and languages on each store.
When I add my own hreflang links the default hreflang links are still there. This way I would have duplicate hreflang links.
Is there a setting that removes the default hreflang links generation from the content_for_header object?
Thanks for your help.
Hey @Brecht, yes you can disable the native hreflang implementation - please get in touch with our support team and they can do this for you!
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hi @coleatkinson,
@coleatkinson wrote:Hey @Brecht, yes you can disable the native hreflang implementation - please get in touch with our support team and they can do this for you!
I work with custom hreflang tags and sometimes need to disable native hreflang implementation.
Is there any possibility to disable native hreflang implementation using Rest or GraphQL API?
Thank you for your work!
Hey @Arthur_Korniyen - not right now, but exposing the ability to do this in the admin or via API is something that we may consider.
Cole | Product @Shopify
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so what is the set back? I do like to know the main reason to restricted membership?
H i did a check of my hreflang tags and got the result shown in the first attachment. I thought Shopify will automatically add hreflang tags instead I found an emporiumart.com domain set with x-default (while emporiumart.it is my main reference page) and another emporiumart.com page with hreflang tag conflict . How to solve the problem?
Hi @emporiumart, the hreflang tags Shopify has added reflect exactly what your domain settings are:
Your default domain, which targets Rest of World is x-default.
emporiumart.fr does not target a country, but has French as the default language. If you intend this domain to target France as well, then adjust that in your domain settings.
emporiumart.it then also reflect correctly, showing it is targeting Italy, with 3 available languages - Italian, English, French. Let me know if this helps!
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Is there any way to set up a subdirectory with a local targetted currency, through Hreflang, without a subdomain and without using advanced Shopify?
I currently have a main webpage xyz.com which targets NZ and AU, and a subdomain which is us.xyz.com targetting the US. However, I want to remove the subdomain and set up a subdirectory system, where the currency of each country will show as default with Hreflang tags.
It does seem like the Geolocation app can help with that? I haven't been able to read into how these items function, but top-line it looks like this is what the Geolocation app is created for without needing Advance Shopify.
For example
website.com/us - US currency default
website.com/nz - NZ currency default
website.com/tw - TW currency default
website.com/au - AU currency default
Thanks in advance
Hi!
We are going to migrate a store to shopify and we'd like to have 3 regions/subdomains.
eu.xxx.com -> Europe, Euros.
uk.xxx.com ->United Kingdom. Pounds
xxx.com -> Rest of the world, Dollars
We'd like to redirect customers by location to the correct url. Can we do this with Shopify Settings, and Search Console, or do we need any app?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Alex
Hi @alex_pradas,
Today you can only target individual countries with a single domain, however with the announcement of Markets yesterday, this is about to change, and soon you will be able to target an entire region or grouping of countries together with one domain.
You can redirect people to the right domain based on their location natively: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/domains/managing-domains/international-domains#switc...
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Thanks a lot!
For sure we are going to use Markets.
One last question. I've seen stores that have different shipping countries in the checkout depending on the store url:
For example:
https://colorfulstandard.dk/ at the checkout you can only choose Denmark for shipping
https://colorfulstandard.co.uk/ at the checkout you can only choose United Kingdom
We'd like to have this configuration.
eu.xxx.com -> Shipping only to european countries
uk.xxx.com -> Shipping only to UK
xxx.com -> Shipping to rest of the world.
How can we configure this?. Do we need an app?
Thanks.
Álex
We don't restrict shipping countries at checkout based on domain - what you saw in those examples was likely someone running multiple different stores.
We don't do this in case the customer did not select the correct country on the storefront. They are still free to change their shipping country at checkout. If you have different prices setup for different countries using international pricing, then we change the price in checkout according to the country that the customer is shipping to.
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hi @DavidTsaiSEO you can do all of the above with Shopify Markets and subfolders, just release last week: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/markets/international-domains/setting-up-unique-urls/set-up-urls#...
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hi,
is selling in multiple currencies only available for merchants with Shopify Payments? What are the options for merchants that don't have access to Shopify Payments?
And it is only possible to use international domains when you are selling in multiple currencies using Shopify Payments?
Thanks
Hi @MarLuz - yes, selling in multiple currencies is only possible when using Shopify Payments.
Targeting countries with international domains will soon be available to all merchants on all plans, regardless of payment gateway, with the release of Shopify Markets.
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hi there ,
We're an Italy based fashion company and we are primarily selling on-line to US customers, We have two domains : www.shop.com which displays all prices in US D and www.shop.it which displays all prices in Euro. The base currency of the store is US $ and except for the .it domain all prices are displayed in US $.
The issue is the following : We would like all customers coming from EU based countries to get automatically directed to www.shop.it , the same way all Italian customers ARE automatically directed to the shop.it domain. Somehow this is not happening. For instance customers from Germany, unless the specifically go to the shop.it domain, will visit the .com domain and see prices in US $ . In previous posts it was mentioned that one could re-direct customers from certain regions ( i.e. Europe I assume) to a specific domain but I haven't found a way to do that. Is there a way ?
My second question pertains to setting different prices in different regions/currencies: I read that setting different prices in different currencies is not possible in the regular shopify plan. Does this apply regardless of the number of domain one uses ? So if customers logging in from Italy get automatically re-directed to the shop.it site , will the prices be set at a fixed exchange rate from the base currency or can you actually set different prices on a domain other than the principal one ?
My last question pertains again to a customer coming from Germany who gets directed to the .com site. If I want to lower the price point in Euro compared to what we charge in the US in $ and therefore I'm fixing an exchange rate accordingly : At what point will the customer see the ( artificially set) exchanged price in Euro ? Only at check out ? Does that mean that the price they see first in $ might be much higher than the price charged at check out in Euro if we want to make the prices in Euro more competitive ?
Thank you for your help,
shopify handle hreflang, but not correctly.
Cole | Product @Shopify
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@coleatkinson thank you for fast replay! It is not really big problem. As you can see in photo. hreflang should have not only for example "EN-GB" , but and simple "EN" in hreflang. x-default not enought
Hello and thank you for you post.
Can I use my already purchased app for the sub-domain page, or do I need to get the same apps again?
I need a new page for multi-currency checkout.
Hey @coleatkinson,
Thanks so much for this post and for the markets feature. Will be so helpful!
But we need some help to get our hreflang tags right for SEO.
We've added new markets for countries and regions in Shopify, and we're launching our site soon.
You've mentioned Shopify automatically adds hreflang tags, but I can't see these in the code. Is there somewhere we can preview these to check they have been implemented correctly?
The reason I ask is, for our key markets, where Shopify allows, we have set a sub-folder URL:
Primary market - Australia - / (cannot set subfolder)
United Kingdom - /en-gb
United States - /en-us
New Zealand - /en-nz
Canada - /en-ca
Brazil - /en-br
Japan - /en-jp
Europe (~40 countries) - we have set no subfolder. - / (cannot set only /en)
International (~180 countries) - we have set no subfolder. - /
We are seeking for our hreflang tags to be as follows, so that where we are targeting a country we indicate this to Google, and where we have regions (e.g. Europe) we indicate to Google the site is just a default of 'English':
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="your-store.myshopify.com" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-au" href="your-store.myshopify.com/en-au" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="your-store.myshopify.com/en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="your-store.myshopify.com/en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-nz" href="your-store.myshopify.com/en-nz" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="your-store.myshopify.com/en-ca" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-br" href="your-store.myshopify.com/en-br" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-jp" href="your-store.myshopify.com/en-jp" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-br" href="your-store.myshopify.com/en-br" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="your-store.myshopify.com" />
Some questions:
Thanks in advance for your help 🙂
Nat
Hi @tsm2 , thanks for these questions!
You cannot set a subfolder on your primary domain for your primary market. This does not impact your hreflang however.
To view your hreflang tags you need to do this in your browser - right click anywhere on the page and select View page source. Ctrl+F or CMD+F on Max, and search hreflang, and all the tags will display. If something in there isn't as you expect, please reach out to us.
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hey @tsm2 , hreflangs are not generated yet because your store is password protected and you have a myshopify domain name - once you add a custom domain, hreflangs will be generated.
We will endeavour to document this more clearly.
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Hey @coleatkinson - ok thank you so much for clarifying! I'll wait until we go live. Thanks for taking the time to investigate for me 🙂
I have strange behavior. We have 2 different shops for different continents(UK/US). We need to map them with hreflang. We made custom hreflang for both shops. But with one is ok and overwrite default hreflang, but in another where use translation app langify it duplicate hreflangs. So google ignore hreflang and see as 2 different websites. APP dev replied it is problem in shopify side. https://worldcondoms.co.uk/ and https://worldcondoms.com/
Hello!
So we are currently selling on USA market with the domain name shop.com.
We have a USA bank account and 2 USA warehouses.
Currently we are looking into selling to European markets and browsing our options, since we are going to need :
1. Different currency (EURO)
2. Different language (Spanish, Deutsch, French etc)
3. Different warehouse (Poland/Germany)
4. Different bank account, since we would like to use local bank (Poland/Germany)
As I understood :
1) We can do subfolders for this, but we wont be able to have different shopify store.
2) We can do subdomains for this, but it still won't allow us to use different shopify store.
3) We can do different domain and this will answer all our questions.
Am I correct or there is a workaround?
We need to use european company for european orders for tax and vat reasons.
Thank you
Hi @invis,
If you want to use a separate company and be paid out in a different currency, then this will require a separate Shopify store at the moment.
You can keep shop.com on your US store, and have a eu.shop.com subdomain or shop.eu top-level domain on the store which will be selling into Europe. You can't have shop.com/eu on a separate store, however - this can only be done with Markets on a single store.
Let me know if this answers your question!
Cole | Product @Shopify
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Thank you for your reply.
I've been in contact with our SEO company and was told, that there be some issues with
hreflang :
1) Since both USA and UK/Europe will have an english version of the sight, Google might show to the USA users European subdomain.
2) If we want to cover with eu.shop.com - all European Union, hreflang is only available for countries, not regions.
Any solutions on this?
any updates on my question?
Hi,
We from india and in india there are lot of features not enabled by shopify.
We want to start a new shopify US account with theme in built currency converter and langauge converter .also wish to ship worldwide using shopify markets and shopify payements.
what docs needed for these ,please guide us we can start the US documentation process.
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