Global retail e-commerce sales are expected to exceed $7.3 trillion by 2025, with e-commerce accounting for 23.6 percent of total retail sales. That’s a big pie. However, many merchants believe that international selling is challenging. It was before we had Shopify Markets.
To reach overseas customers before Shopify Markets, you had to sell on a marketplace or collaborate with a third-party store.
Now, with Shopify Markets, you may sell outside your native nation without dealing with issues like currency conversion, language localization, local payment methods, or duty and import taxes.
Ideally, Shopify merchants have access to all cross-border tools straight out of the box.
Let’s get started now!
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What Is Shopify Markets?
The worldwide e-commerce business is expected to be worth $7.385 trillion by 2025. Thus, e-commerce firms have a big chance to profit from the surge in online sales. You may reach customers all around the world with your items.
However, selling in international markets has its set of obstacles.
Previously, Shopify users who wanted to sell in different countries had to create new stores for each one, which could be time-consuming and expensive with all the risks of an appropriate translation, localization, and administration.
As a result, Shopify Markets intends to rise to the occasion. Shopify Markets debuted in September 2021 and offered a variety of capabilities based on your Shopify plan.
Specifically, it provides everything you need to effortlessly locate, establish, and manage international markets from your admin dashboard, allowing you to scale and optimize your global strategy. Markets also enable you to reach out to new customers worldwide in just a few clicks, increase sales with personalized buying experiences tailored to each region, and optimize your business for cross-border selling.
What Issues Does Shopify Markets Support?
Although Shopify Markets is available for all Shopify plans, it operates differently for retailers on the Advanced Shopify and Shopify Plus subscriptions. Before diving into the detailed features, let’s look at the overview table below:
| All Shopify Plans | Additional features for Advanced/Plus plans | |
| Feature | – Control how you sell to each market from a single location.
– With Shopify Payments, you may sell in 133 different currencies. – Use Shopify Payments to offer local payment choices. – You can sell in up to 20 different languages. – Create unique domains for local SEO purposes. – Provide smart settings to optimize cross-border selling operations. |
– At the checkout process, collect duty and import taxes.
– Use Shopify Payments to create custom pricing for each market. – Create catalogs and stores that are unique to each market. – Manage market-specific fulfillment sites. |
| Transaction fee | – There is a 0.85 percent fee for each order for duty, and import taxes calculation with Shopify Payments
– 1.5% transaction fee when using an alternative payment provider. – There is a 1.5% fee for each order when converting money. |
– There is a 0.85 percent fee for each order for duty and import taxes calculation with Shopify Payments
– 1.5% transaction fee when using an alternative payment provider. – There is a 1.5% fee for each order when converting money. |
Creating localized experiences
Due to language, currency, and logistics challenges, international selling has always been challenging. Localizing text and dealing with currency conversion rates can be expensive and time-consuming. Shopify Markets is available to help you solve those issues.
You may now allow international consumers to explore and purchase in their language and currency.
Domains
Specifically, creating custom domains for multiple locations and languages is now possible. It can be accomplished in three ways, including primary domain only, domain or subdomain, and subfolders. These are SEO-friendly options that are simple to apply using Shopify Markets.
It’s worth noting that you can create language and nation groups. This is useful in countries where there are several languages. For example, for English (en) Canada (ca), use shop.com/en-ca, and for French (fr) Canada (ca), use shop.com/fr-ca (ca).
Languages
It’s critical when entering new markets to provide content and product details in the local language. According to a recent poll, 40% of customers will not purchase from an online store in a different language.
Ideally, Shopify Markets is available in 20 other languages. These new localization options can assist retailers in translating their stores to fulfill the needs of a broader range of customers.
Currencies
For cross-border buyers, the ability to make purchases in local currencies is a must. If no currency converter is available, 92% strongly prefer to do so, and 13% quit their cart.
As a result, Shopify Markets also accepts 133 different currencies. This isn’t as simple as it appears. Aside from changing the currency, each area has its regulations for rounding purchases.
Market optimization possibilities come with currencies, which we’ll discuss later. To put it another way, having 133 currencies is a lot more than just a calculator.
Collecting duty and import taxes at checkout
Before finishing the checkout process, every online buyer wants to know how much a thing will cost.
One of the most challenging tasks for e-commerce shops in international markets is to provide this information to customers before they click the “purchase now” button.
You must be aware of the charges and import taxes that may affect the total cost of your goods. However, taxation differs significantly from one country to the next. Some countries levy a sales tax, while others employ a value-added tax (VAT), requiring more complex computations. Some countries subject all products to a single sales tax, while others have a variable sales tax rate based on product class. In contrast, others still entirely exempt particular products or products from other countries.
Fortunately, Shopify Markets generates this data for you and collects the duty and import taxes due at purchase.
When your consumers receive their order, they may view the exact item cost and avoid any delivery issues or additional charges.
Regarding payment methods, Shopify Markets recommends the most popular payment methods for the region.
Moreover, while PayPal and credit cards dominate online B2C purchases in the United States, this is not the case everywhere. Allowing shoppers to utilize payment methods prevalent in their nation is one of the fundamental ways Shopify Markets enables merchants to appeal to shoppers worldwide.
Providing several market operation tools
While most market localization features are complete, other market operation tools are still in the works.
Today, we’ll talk about four topics: customizable market options, pricing configuration, inventory and fulfillment control, and intelligent settings.
Customizable market options
Depending on your items, it might make more sense to sell to broader regions than individual countries. Instead of constructing a separate storefront for each of the 27 member countries, you can create a storefront for the European Union.
Besides, setting up markets and selecting areas is a breeze with Shopify Markets. You can also customize your storefront to appeal to shoppers from different countries in those regions.
For example, if you create an Asia Pacific market, you may still show prices in local currency for shoppers in each country.
Pricing configuration
Shopify Markets can convert your costs into the local currency for you. However, there are situations when you’ll need to do more than alter your prices.
In fact, your primary market pricing approach can differ from your secondary market pricing plan. Thus, you may already have an established customer base in your immediate market, allowing you to maximize your margins.
You may want to cut your margins to attract new clients in the secondary market. Also, you might set different margins to entice new clients if you have a primary market pricing plan that differs from your secondary markets.
For example, instead of just converting USD to CAD, a retailer may modify the price by -10% to encourage local sales if Canadians are impacted by import duties and outperform the American storefront. Alternatively, since there is a lack of local competition, they discover that their products are doing very well in Italy, they can raise the price by 10%, then 20%, and so on.
Inventory and fulfillment control
Customers will automatically see the products you may ship to their area when they use Shopify Markets.
Suppose you have a fulfillment partner in France that only ships to the EU, shoppers in that market will only see goods from that fulfillment partner.
This helps you avoid scenarios where an order is placed but not completed. Shopify Markets adjusts your storefront inventory automatically based on market product availability.
Smart settings
Selling to many new markets can be daunting at first. Hence, how will you maintain track of each market’s best practices and strategies?
Luckily, Shopify markets can assist you by utilizing its extensive sales data. Smart settings keep track of your progress and make automated adjustments to help you sell more. Also, you can turn off intelligent settings in the dashboard if you wish to be in complete control.
Although there isn’t much data on the feature’s usefulness, it will be interesting to observe how it affects conversions.
On the other hand, the new market administrator saves lots of time. Its purpose is to assist retailers in setting up localized storefronts from their primary stores. The retailer can tailor the shopping experience in each cross-border location, starting with a single screen. This is critical because what sells and why varies significantly from region to country. A forceful sale may be necessary for one country, but it will be a complete turnoff in another.
Both options are available on the Shopify Markets admin page. Localization can refer to a country or a region. Besides, a merchant can opt for many localizations for each European country or a single one for the entire European Union.
Remember that languages and areas can be handled independently, so a retailer can set up “shop.com/fr-eu”, “shop.com/de-eu”, and “shop.com/sp-eu” to cater to French, German, and Spanish speakers, respectively.
Read More: Social E-Commerce Examples: What You Can Learn To Improve Sales?
International E-commerce Checklist
When deciding to sell globally, there are many things to consider. However, in this short checklist, we’ll just discuss three essential factors:
- Identifying potential – while digital transaction volumes are increasing in many countries, this is simply the beginning. The trajectory of e-commerce growth will be influenced by population, geography, technological maturity, and logistics. If you’re entering a new market, you’ll also have to deal with the problem of building brand awareness.
- Understanding the difficulties – customs, duties, and taxes can be complicated, and your company’s legal status can influence your ability to trade in some countries. Working with an international fulfillment provider rather than selling directly may be better.
- Delivering localization – once you’ve determined that your company has a viable global market, you’ll need to learn about your clients’ demands and preferences. Translation of your product descriptions into the local language and appropriate graphics and local payment preferences are vital considerations.
Due to this checklist, we believe that Shopify Markets is the key for merchants to expand their stores and revenue.
Are you new to the e-commerce industry and Shopify? Refer to Shopify Checklist: Important Steps Before Launching A Store to smoothen your work!
Making Cross-Border Selling A Breeze With Shopify Markets
It’s never been easier to sell to overseas customers than Shopify Markets.
Currency conversion, local languages, payment options, tariffs, and taxes are all available immediately, simplifying the international selling process. Markets can be made up of a single country or a collection of countries to create a customized market.
You can freely customize currency and preferred payment methods, pricing and rounding rules, local product availability, appropriate domain names, and SEO for users. However, more international payment gateway partnerships and more choices to tailor the checkout process will be required to properly deliver on this global promise.
Want to break through the limits of default Magento? Wonder how to have a unique and professional website? Shopify development services are right here for you!
In short, Shopify Markets is the simplest way to get started if you’re thinking about expanding into new markets. Thus, we hope that this article may be of assistance to you to learn more about Shopify Markets default features and what the limitations are.
