For brick and mortar retailers, expanding into a new city represents a monumental challenge. The costs of purchasing or constructing a new store, and then drumming up the custom in the local area for that new store can often be prohibitively expensive.

With e-commerce however, retailers can operate without boundaries, and be wherever their customers are. But for too long, one boundary has persisted. The final frontier, quite literally, of international borders, has often been too difficult to surmount.

Shopify Markets changes that. Markets offers a package of features which unifies everything you need to go global, no matter the size of your business.

What Is Shopify Markets?

Merchants have long been able to sell internationally on Shopify, although it’s previously been limited to precisely that - selling products. But from taxation to currency, domains to payment methods, there’s a litany of issues that require additional time and effort to start selling abroad, not to mention extra costs.

There’s also the issue of localising your store to appeal to international customers, with the problems of languages and local pricing all creating a barrier to success.

Selling internationally prior to Shopify Markets meant taking care of these problems individually, with a myriad of costly apps available to do part of the job. It often resulted in convoluted setups, with multiple standalone stores created for individual markets. This multiplied the amount of work involved, as well as the associated costs.

Shopify Markets, a feature available with all Shopify plans, pulls many of these elements together, and takes care of them for you. Ultimately, it enables you to provide localised versions of your store, without having to create all-new standalone stores.

These localised versions of your store appear seamless to customers, with local domain names, languages, prices and currencies. With that in mind, let’s get down to the details.

Creating Confidence.

All e-commerce merchants will know the importance of building confidence for customers, especially when it comes to reducing bounce rates. International customers visiting your site may be put off by a domain name from a different country, or prices in a foreign currency for example.

Shopify Markets supports 133 currencies worldwide, so if you decided to go down under and sell products in Australia, you could list products in Australian dollars rather than British pounds. If you wanted to enter the French market, your localised site could be set up to use a .fr domain name, rather than your usual .co.uk address. And to top it all, you could say ciao to your Italian customers in Italian (easily implemented with some Shopify Markets-friendly translation apps).

Each of these features help to boost confidence amongst customers, as it gives the perception that your company has a much more established presence in their own country. Such features also reduce complexity and friction in the customer journey, as they won’t be having to step aside and conduct their own currency conversion for instance.

So with confident customers, how do you take their orders, and most importantly, get them distributed to them?

Payments and Logistics.

With the old approach to selling products internationally on Shopify, merchants could only set prices per individual store. With the frivolity of current exchange rates, it could be a costly exercise to sell items in Eurozone countries at British pound sterling prices. But Shopify Markets thankfully makes things easier, as you’re able to set specific prices for individual markets. This helps your business profit margins, while ensuring prices are manageable for customers. The feature also supports local payment providers, with built-in support for providers from around the world.

Taxes and duties are another thorn in the side of international retailers. Selling products abroad will always mean incurring additional taxes and customs duties associated with the exportation and importation of products. Keeping track of them, and accounting for them in your prices can be a time consuming and irritatingly complex process. In the worst case, these fees end up being absorbed directly by the customer, with a surprise duty to pay before they can receive their parcel.

But merchants and customers alike can avoid these nasty surprises, as Shopify Markets takes care of them for you. Depending upon your location, the country of origin of your products, and the location of your customer, Shopify Markets can automatically calculate these fees and display them at checkout, ensuring maximum transparency before a customer decides to purchase.

With the ordering out of the way, getting your products to customers around the world is a challenge in and of itself. Thankfully, Shopify Markets takes some of the pressure off, by intelligently allocating your stock between your warehouses or distribution centres. If a customer orders an item in Germany, it would be far more efficient to send the items from your German warehouse, rather than your UK warehouse.

Time To Get Started.

We’ll work with your business to get Shopify Markets up and running, and as soon as it is, you’ll find it as an additional set of options in your Shopify admin account, allowing you to customise, add or remove additional markets and their associated storefronts.

The world is your oyster with Shopify Markets. Global expansion is within reach, and so are millions of other customers around the world waiting to order your products. It won’t be long before you’re on the road to global domination.

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