How to Set Up Shopify Markets for Global Selling

59% of online shoppers already buy from stores outside their home country. Cross-border ecommerce hit $551 billion in 2025 and is growing at over 15% annually. The Shopify Markets setup process takes about an hour, and it's the single fastest way to start selling internationally without running separate stores for every country.

But showing a shopper in Germany your prices in USD with English-only product pages isn't international selling. It's hoping someone tolerates a bad experience long enough to check out. Stores that display prices in local currency convert up to 15% better than those that don't. Shopify Markets is how you close that gap without running separate stores for every country.

What Shopify Markets Actually Does

Shopify Markets is Shopify's built-in international selling hub that lets you manage currencies, languages, pricing, and duties for multiple countries from a single store. Instead of creating a separate store for France, another for Saudi Arabia, and another for Mexico, you create "markets" — groups of countries that share similar settings.

Each market can have its own:

• Currency — show prices in the shopper's local currency
• Language — translate your storefront using Shopify's Translate & Adapt app
• Domain or subfolder — yourstore.com/fr for France, yourstore.com/de for Germany
• Pricing rules — adjust prices up or down by percentage, or set fixed prices per market
• Duties and tax collection — calculate and collect import duties at checkout so customers aren't surprised at delivery

You already have one market set up: your primary market, which is your home country. Everything else builds on top of that.

Step 1: Create Your First International Market

Go to Settings → Markets in your Shopify admin. You'll see your primary market listed. Click Add market.

Name the market something you'll recognize — "Europe," "Gulf States," or "Southeast Asia." This name is internal only. Customers never see it.

Then add the countries you want in that market. You can add individual countries or group several together. Grouping makes sense when countries share similar pricing, language, and shipping economics. A "MENA" market covering Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar works well because shipping costs and customer expectations are similar across those countries.

If you already ship to the countries you're adding, the market activates automatically. If not, you'll need to set up shipping rates first (under Settings → Shipping and delivery) before the market goes live.

Step 2: Set Up Local Currencies and Pricing

This is where most of the conversion lift comes from. Under your new market's settings, enable local currency. Shopify supports 130+ currencies and will auto-convert your prices based on current exchange rates.

Auto-conversion works, but it creates ugly prices. Your $29.99 product becomes €27.43 in euros — not a number that builds confidence. You have two better options:

1. Rounding rules — tell Shopify to round converted prices to the nearest .99 or .00. This cleans up the numbers automatically.
2. Fixed prices — set specific prices per market. Your $29.99 product becomes €29.99 in Europe. This gives you full control over pricing psychology and lets you account for market-specific costs like higher shipping or import duties.

Fixed prices take more work but perform better. If you're serious about a market, use them. If you're testing demand in a new region, auto-conversion with rounding rules is a reasonable starting point.

You can also apply a blanket percentage adjustment. Adding 10% to all prices in a market is a quick way to cover duties or currency risk without setting every price individually.

Step 3: Configure International Domains

Shopify Markets gives you three domain options for international storefronts:

• Subfolders (recommended for most stores): yourstore.com/en-ca for Canada, yourstore.com/fr for France. Easiest to set up, and all your SEO authority stays on one domain.
• Subdomains: ca.yourstore.com, fr.yourstore.com. More separation, but splits your domain authority.
• Country-code top-level domains: yourstore.de, yourstore.fr. Best for brand presence in a specific country, but requires purchasing separate domains.

For most Shopify merchants, subfolders are the right choice. They're free, require zero DNS configuration, and Google treats them as part of your main domain. To set them up, go to your market settings, click Languages and domains, select Manage domains, choose Use subfolders, and enter a suffix like "eu" or "ca."

One thing to know: if you deactivate a market that uses subfolders, those URLs stop working immediately. Any SEO value you've built for those pages disappears. Don't deactivate markets casually.

Step 4: Add Languages With Translate & Adapt

Currency gets customers to the product page. Language gets them through checkout. Install Shopify's free Translate & Adapt app from the App Store.

The app lets you translate your storefront content — product titles, descriptions, collection pages, and checkout — into any language your markets need. You can use Shopify's auto-translation as a starting point, then manually edit the translations that matter most: product descriptions, checkout fields, and your homepage.

Prioritize translating your top 20 products and your checkout flow first. Those pages handle 80% of your international revenue. You can fill in the rest over time.

Step 5: Enable Duties and Import Tax Collection

Nothing kills an international order faster than unexpected charges at the door. A customer in Brazil orders a $50 product, then the courier asks for another $25 in import duties on delivery. That order gets refused. If you're also navigating the new de minimis exemption changes, collecting duties upfront is even more critical.

Shopify Markets lets you calculate and collect duties at checkout using HS (Harmonized System) codes. Go to your market settings, find Duties and import taxes, and enable Collect duties at checkout.

You'll need to add HS codes to your products. These are international classification codes that tell customs what's in the package. Shopify suggests codes based on your product descriptions — review them, but verify anything that looks wrong. An incorrect HS code means your customer pays the wrong duty amount, and that creates refund headaches.

This feature costs an additional 0.5–0.85% per eligible order if you use Shopify Payments (1.5% with third-party providers). For most merchants selling internationally, that fee pays for itself by reducing refused deliveries and chargebacks from surprise costs.

Step 6: Review Shipping and Payment Settings

Markets handles currency, language, and duties. But your shipping zones and payment methods need to match.

Check that your Shipping and delivery settings cover every country in your new market. If you added a "Europe" market but your shipping profile only covers the UK and Germany, customers in France can't check out.

For payments, verify that your payment provider supports the currencies you've enabled. Shopify Payments covers most major currencies automatically. If you use a third-party gateway, check their supported currencies — a mismatch means customers see local pricing but can't actually pay.

For COD merchants expanding internationally, your order form needs to support the same currencies and languages as your markets. EasySell's order form supports multi-currency and multi-language out of the box, so your COD checkout stays consistent with whatever Shopify Markets serves to the customer. For more on matching your form to each market, see our order form localization guide.

Markets vs. Managed Markets: Which Do You Need?

Shopify offers two tiers of international selling:

Shopify Markets (included on all plans) gives you multi-currency, multi-language, market-specific pricing, subfolders, and basic duty estimation. This is enough for most merchants testing or growing international sales.

Managed Markets (formerly Markets Pro, powered by Global-e) goes further. Global-e becomes the merchant of record for international orders. It handles tax registration, tax remittance, local payment methods, and guaranteed landed cost calculations. It also locks in exchange rates for 30 days after an order, protecting you from currency fluctuations.

If you sell under $10,000/month internationally, standard Markets is the right starting point. If cross-border is a significant revenue channel and you're dealing with VAT registration headaches or high rates of refused deliveries from incorrect duty estimates, Managed Markets is worth the upgrade.

Shopify Markets Setup Checklist

Here's the order that gets you live the fastest:

1. Create your market and add countries (Settings → Markets)
2. Enable local currency with rounding rules
3. Set up subfolders for international domains
4. Install Translate & Adapt and translate your top products and checkout
5. Add HS codes to products and enable duty collection
6. Verify shipping zones cover every country in the market
7. Confirm your payment provider supports the currencies you've enabled
8. Place a test order from a VPN in the target country to check the full experience

Step 8 is the one most merchants skip. Browse your own store from the customer's perspective before going live. Check that prices display correctly, the language switches properly, and the checkout flow makes sense. Five minutes of testing prevents a week of customer complaints.

Cross-border ecommerce is growing faster than domestic ecommerce in almost every region. The infrastructure to sell internationally used to require multiple storefronts, currency plugins, and custom tax logic. Shopify Markets puts all of it in one dashboard. The merchants who set it up now are the ones capturing international demand while their competitors are still showing everyone USD.