One of the reasons Shopify is one of the world’s most popular ecommerce platforms, is that it’s constantly updating its functionality to serve the needs of evolving businesses. In the last few years, Shopify has introduced a range of new features and services to ecommerce store owners, including the highly renowned Shopify Markets service.
Intended to offer companies an all-in-one global ecommerce solution, Shopify Markets provides business leaders with a way to expand their online store’s presence, and connect with customers around the world.
The solution handles all of the complicated aspects of “going global” with your business, so you can focus on delighting your customers.
Let’s take a closer look.
What is Shopify Markets?
Shopify Markets is a global ecommerce service, introduced to the Shopify platform in September 2021. Like many Shopify features, the functionality you can expect to get from Shopify Markets will vary depending on your chosen subscription plan.
Primarily, Shopify Markets supports companies in transforming their local ecommerce store into a global business. You can use the system to sell in multiple countries, all while retaining the same single Shopify store. Markets localizes your storefront on your behalf when customers from different countries visit your website. This ensures each user can see the right currencies and languages.
On the back end, Shopify Markets also handles duties and taxes, helps to ensure you comply with sales regulations worldwide, and handles cross-border complexity. There are even tools available to help you make shipping easier if you’re delivering items worldwide.
The Shopify Markets Features
Before introducing Shopify Markets, Shopify already supported cross-border commerce for merchants, with solutions like multicurrency and international domains. However, Shopify Markets takes the global capabilities of Shopify to the next level, by eliminating common complexities such as currency conversion, language localization, and providing local payment methods to customers.
Accessible within the Shopify admin hub, Shopify Markets is essentially a centralized hub of tools for international selling. Using the solution, companies can access the following features:
Domains and SEO (Search engine optimization)
Within the Shopify Markets hub, companies can set up international stores, with a single business account. You can create custom subdomain options for customers from other countries, and subfolders for specific target markets, to create more localized versions of your store. You’ll also be able to automatically redirect visitors to market-specific domains relevant to their location.
Retailers can offer country and native language recommendations dynamically based on a customer’s geographic location, and use third-party apps to send localized product feeds to customers via Google and Meta. Shopify will even automatically create SEO tags for you, to help boost your presence in local search results.
Local Currencies and Pricing
Shopify Markets supports local currencies and pricing settings, so you can ensure customers always see the price most relevant to them. You can automatically apply rounding to boost conversions with Shopify Payments, and set custom pricing adjustments for each market.
Plus, you can choose to send draft orders and invoices to customers in their local currency, and decide whether you want to automatically include taxes upfront in your prices in certain countries.
Checkout Localization
As well as using the right currencies for international markets, you can also use Shopify Markets to optimize the checkout experience for every customer. You can allow your customers to checkout using preferred payment methods, like PayPal in their local area. Merchants can also automatically estimate duties and import taxes for each person’s location.
If you opt for the “Pro” version of Shopify markets, you can also offer a wider range of payment options, calculate duties with no reconciliation or remittance required, and automatically localize address forms for different markets.
Fulfilment and Shipping
With compatible third-party shipping apps, Shopify customers can print pre-paid duties labels for international orders, and integrate commercial invoices with the checkout for international sales. You’ll also be able to tap into customs documentation management, negotiated rates for your pricing strategy, and inform new customers of accurate inventories based on local warehouses.
Liability management
If you’re using the Pro version of the Shopify Markets service, you can also access extra support for liability and risk, offload tax filing, registration and remission, and adjust product catalogs for each market automatically. This means you can remove items with import restrictions in certain countries.
Plus, Shopify offers fraud protection for your ecommerce sales, to make sure your store is protected from potential issues. Plus, guaranteed foreign exchange solutions can mitigate problems with refunds.
Markets Admin
Finally, the single store admin solution for Shopify Markets allows you to control all of your international ecommerce and fulfillment locations from one backend. You can access consolidated reporting for your primary market and all other locations.
What’s more you can optimize your international sales with personalized recommendations and default settings intended to boost conversions and customer experience in each market. Shopify even offers integrated B2B and subscription selling options.
Shopify Markets Pricing: How Much Does it Cost?
Connecting with international customers through Shopify Markets does incur some extra fees. While most features, such as language translation, are free to use, the solution does add a 0.85% fee to each order when import taxes, exchange rates, and duties are calculated with Shopify Payments. If you use another payments provider, the fee is 1.5%.
Additionally, you’ll pay a 1.5% fee when you convert currencies from credit cards with Shopify Payments, and you may have fees to pay for using local payment methods too.
Shopify is also working on “Markets Pro” for the ecommerce market, which is currently available in Limited Early access for the US sector. Markets Pro gives you access to a wider range of features on your Shopify single dashboard, to help minimize complexity and risk. It’s an expansion suite which helps you make the most of sales in specific countries, with cross-border sales management.
Shopify Markets Pro comes with a 6.5% transaction fee (which includes payment processing fees). There’s also a 2.5% currency conversion fee, which is automatically added to product prices to be paid by your customer.
Who Can Use Shopify Markets?
Most Shopify merchants throughout the US will be able to start using Shopify Markets straight away. Just head into the Settings section of your Shopify admin page, and click on “Add Market” to get started. This will automatically enable access to different currencies, product availability management, language translation and more for international customers.
However, Shopify Markets Pro is only available to a select number of US stores at the moment. Shopify is planning on rolling the extra smart settings out to other countries in future.
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