Setting up Shopify Markets

Markets is how one Shopify store serves several countries: currencies, languages, pricing, catalogues, shipping and payment methods, all per region. The configuration is an afternoon. The decisions inside it are worth more thought.

If you're still deciding whether one store is the right shape at all, start with multiple stores or Markets.

Create the markets

Under Settings → Markets. A market is a country or a group of countries sharing settings.

Group countries that share a currency, a language and a shipping profile. Give a country its own market when any of those genuinely differ, or when its pricing needs to be set independently.

Don't create a market for a country you can't actually ship to. Every market you enable is a promise.

Domains or subfolders

The decision people get wrong, and it's hard to change later.

• Subfolders — yourstore.com/fr — is the default and usually right. All the authority stays on one domain, one SSL certificate, one thing to maintain.
• Country domains — yourstore.fr — reads as more local and can help with trust in some markets. But each domain builds authority separately, from zero, and you now maintain several.

For most merchants, subfolders. Choose country domains only when local trust is a demonstrated commercial factor in that market.

Either way, verify hreflang. Shopify generates it with Markets, and broken hreflang means your versions compete with each other — the most common technical SEO failure on multi-market stores.

Catalogues and pricing

Per market you can control:

• Which products are available. Useful for regulatory restrictions or licensing.
• Prices. Either converted automatically from your base currency, or set explicitly per market.

Set prices explicitly on your important products. Automatic conversion produces numbers like 1,247.38, and it also means your margin varies by exchange rate. Rounding rules help; explicit prices on your top sellers help more — multi-currency pricing.

Languages

Add languages per market. Translations are managed alongside the original content rather than in a separate store.

Two things that decide whether this works:

• The theme must have every string in locale files, not hard-coded in templates. This is where a badly built theme shows itself — localisation.
• Don't machine-translate the things that matter. Product descriptions might survive it; checkout, policies and error messages won't.

And translate metafield content too — specifications and care instructions are as customer-facing as the description.

Shipping and payments

Per market:

• Shipping profiles and rates for that region. Shipping setup.
• Payment methods available there. Preferences vary sharply by country, and the method that converts in one is ignored in the next — payment gateways.
• Duties and import taxes, where you choose to collect them at checkout.

That last one is worth deciding rather than defaulting. Collecting duties at checkout costs conversion; not collecting them produces a surprise bill at the door and a support problem.

What to test before launch

For each market, from a browser in that region or with the country selector set:

1. The correct currency and prices show.
2. The correct language renders — including the notification emails.
3. Shipping options appear and are priced sensibly.
4. Payment methods available there work.
5. Taxes and duties behave as intended.
6. The address form matches the local format.
7. hreflang is present and reciprocal.
8. A real order, end to end.

Item six is small and it's the one customers notice — a form demanding a state for a country that has none reads as "this shop isn't for me".

Reporting

Markets gives you sales by market natively. Watch conversion rate per market rather than total revenue: a market with high traffic and low conversion usually has a specific fixable problem — a missing payment method, a shipping rate nobody will pay, or a translation nobody proofread.

Markets is the right answer far more often than separate stores. The two decisions to get right are subfolders versus domains, and explicit prices on your top sellers.