Shopify has made international selling more accessible than at any point in its history. Shopify Markets consolidates currency, language, tax, and domain management into a single store. Expansion stores remain the right solution for brands that need granular regional control. Knowing which approach suits your brand — and how to execute it properly — is where most brands get it wrong.
This guide covers everything DTC brands on Shopify and Shopify Plus need to know about selling internationally in 2026 — from choosing your first market to configuring Shopify Markets Pro, structuring your store architecture, and managing localisation at scale. We have built international stores for brands across food, drink, and wellness categories, including Sabatino Truffles' three-store consolidation into a single Shopify Plus platform covering US, EU, and B2B markets.
Use the links below to jump to a specific section:
- 1. Choosing which markets to enter first
- 2. What is Shopify Markets?
- 3. Currency control and multi-currency
- 4. Multi-language and localisation
- 5. Localised domain structure
- 6. Taxes and duties with Shopify Markets
- 7. Pricing control and payments
- 8. Shopify Markets plans and pricing
- 9. Shopify Markets Pro explained
- 10. When to use expansion stores instead
- 11. Shopify Markets vs expansion stores: which is right for you?
- 12. International shipping and logistics
- 13. Benefits of Shopify Markets
- 14. Limitations of Shopify Markets
- 15. How to get started with international selling on Shopify
1. Choosing which markets to enter first
Before configuring anything in Shopify, the first question is which markets to target. International expansion costs time, money, and operational complexity — entering the wrong market first compounds all three.
Start with your data. Shopify Analytics and Google Analytics both show you where your existing international traffic is coming from. If a meaningful percentage of your visitors are already coming from Germany, the US, or Australia and converting at a lower rate than domestic traffic, that is a signal of latent demand — people who want to buy but are being put off by currency friction, shipping costs, or a non-localised experience.
Beyond your own data, assess three things for any target market: demand for your product category, local competition, and logistical complexity. Markets that are geographically close or share language and cultural similarities with your home market are typically the lowest-friction starting point. A UK food brand entering the US faces very different regulatory, shipping, and localisation requirements than one entering Ireland or Australia.
For subscription brands specifically, check whether your chosen subscription platform — Recharge or Skio — supports multi-currency subscriptions in your target markets before committing to an architecture. Some subscription logic behaves differently across regional Shopify stores than it does within a single Shopify Markets setup.
2. What is Shopify Markets?
Shopify Markets is Shopify's built-in internationalisation toolkit, designed to let merchants sell globally from a single Shopify store. Launched in 2021 and significantly expanded since, it consolidates currency, language, domain, tax, and pricing management into one place — removing the need to build and maintain separate stores for each market.
Before Shopify Markets, merchants wanting to sell internationally typically had two options: accept the friction of a single-currency, single-language store, or build out multiple expansion stores for each market. Shopify Markets introduced a third path — a single store with market-specific configurations for each region, managed from a unified admin.
Shopify Markets is available to all Shopify plans, with additional features unlocked on Shopify Plus via Shopify Markets Pro. It integrates with Shopify Payments and supports 136 currencies, localised pricing, market-specific domains, translated storefronts, and automated duty and tax calculations for international orders.
3. Currency control and multi-currency
Shopify Markets offers 136 currency options, allowing international customers to browse and purchase in their local currency throughout the entire shopping experience — from product pages through to checkout, order confirmation, and refunds. Research consistently shows that presenting prices in a customer's local currency reduces cart abandonment, with Shopify citing a 33% reduction in abandonment rates as a benchmark.
Currency conversion in Shopify Markets is handled automatically via Shopify Payments, which applies a real-time exchange rate with a configurable conversion fee (typically 1.5% for Shopify Payments merchants). This means your GBP prices are automatically displayed in USD, EUR, AUD, or any other supported currency without requiring manual price management per market.
For brands that want explicit control over pricing by market — for example, charging $149 USD rather than the converted equivalent of £120 GBP — Shopify Markets allows manual price overrides at the market level. This is useful for markets with different competitive positioning, local tax expectations, or where round-number pricing is commercially important.
One caveat: multi-currency via Shopify Markets requires Shopify Payments. If your brand uses a third-party payment provider, currency conversion needs to be handled separately.
4. Multi-language and localisation
Shopify Markets supports multi-language storefronts through the Translate and Adapt app (available free from the Shopify App Store) or third-party translation apps such as Weglot or Langify. With the right setup, each market can display product descriptions, navigation, checkout, and email communications in the appropriate language for that region.
The two main approaches to translation on Shopify are machine translation (fast and low-cost, but requires editing for quality) and native copywriting (slower and more expensive, but significantly better for conversion in high-value markets). For most brands entering a first international market, machine translation with human editing is the right balance — particularly for product descriptions and high-intent pages like checkout.
If using Weglot or Langify, be mindful of performance impact. Both apps use JavaScript to render translations, which can slow page load times if applied to a content-heavy store. Avoid configuring more than two or three languages through a single app instance — beyond that, the performance overhead becomes material. For brands targeting more than three markets, a multi-store architecture may be more appropriate.
For subscription brands, localisation extends beyond the storefront to subscriber-facing communications. Klaviyo flows for subscription brands can be localised by market using Shopify Markets data passed through to Klaviyo — allowing French subscribers to receive French-language billing notifications, skip confirmation, and win-back sequences.
5. Localised domain structure
Shopify Markets supports three domain approaches for international markets: subfolders (yourstore.com/fr), subdomains (fr.yourstore.com), and country-code top-level domains (yourstore.fr). Each has different SEO implications and different levels of operational overhead.
Subfolders are the lowest-friction option — they inherit the domain authority of the root domain and are the easiest to manage. For most DTC brands entering one or two new markets, subfolders are the right default.
Subdomains give a cleaner URL per market and can be independently configured, but they do not automatically inherit root domain authority. They require separate hreflang configuration and more careful SEO management.
Country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) give the strongest local trust signal — a .fr or .de domain is perceived as a local business in France or Germany — but they require purchasing and managing separate domains, building authority from scratch for each, and significantly more ongoing maintenance. For most DTC brands at the internationalisation stage, they are premature.
Regardless of domain structure, correct hreflang implementation is essential for any multi-language or multi-region Shopify store. Hreflang tags tell search engines which version of a page to serve to users in each country and language combination — without them, Google may serve the wrong version of your store to international visitors, cannibalising your rankings across markets.
6. Taxes and duties with Shopify Markets
Tax and duty compliance is one of the most underestimated complexities of international selling. Shopify Markets includes automatic tax calculation for a wide range of markets, applying the correct VAT, GST, or sales tax rate based on the customer's location at checkout. This removes the need to manually configure tax rates for each market, though it requires verification that your product categories are correctly classified.
For brands selling into the EU, the post-Brexit landscape introduced new import duty thresholds that affect orders shipped from the UK. Orders under €150 are subject to VAT at the point of sale under the EU's Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS) scheme. Shopify Markets can collect and remit this VAT automatically for merchants using Shopify Payments, but IOSS registration is required. This is a step many brands miss when first expanding into EU markets from the UK.
For US expansion, state-level sales tax complexity is significant — over 12,000 taxing jurisdictions exist across the US, and economic nexus thresholds vary by state. Shopify Tax (built into Shopify Markets for US merchants) automates this calculation, but brands with significant US revenue should take specialist tax advice on their obligations.
7. Pricing control and payments
Beyond currency conversion, Shopify Markets allows market-specific pricing overrides. This means you can sell a product at £29.99 in the UK, $39.99 in the US, and €34.99 in France — independently of the live exchange rate. Market-specific pricing is important for brands where competitive positioning varies significantly by region, or where local pricing conventions affect conversion.
Payment methods also vary by market. While card payments are universal, local payment preferences differ significantly — iDEAL is dominant in the Netherlands, Klarna and PayPal are widely expected in Germany, and BNPL adoption varies considerably by market. Shopify Payments supports a range of local payment methods through Shopify Markets, and the configuration is managed per market in the admin rather than requiring separate payment provider integrations.
8. Shopify Markets plans and pricing
Shopify Markets is included with all Shopify plans at no additional cost. The core features — multi-currency, multi-language, market-specific domains, and automatic tax calculation — are available from the Basic plan upwards.
The currency conversion fee (1.5% for Shopify Payments merchants, 2% for merchants on third-party payment providers) applies to all international transactions processed through Shopify Markets. This fee is separate from standard Shopify transaction fees and is worth factoring into margin calculations for international markets.
Shopify Plus merchants have access to Shopify Markets Pro (covered below), which adds advanced duty and tax management, localised checkout experiences, and support for restricted markets — functionality that most DTC brands only need once they are operating at significant international scale.
9. Shopify Markets Pro explained
Shopify Markets Pro is a Shopify Plus-only feature that extends the internationalisation toolkit for brands operating at enterprise scale or in markets with complex compliance requirements. It is powered by Global-e (a Shopify partner) and handles the most demanding aspects of cross-border selling.
The key additions in Markets Pro over standard Shopify Markets are: guaranteed duty and import tax collection at checkout (removing the risk of customers receiving unexpected bills at customs), access to 150+ payment methods and local payment preferences, compliance management for restricted markets, and localised fraud protection. Markets Pro also supports advanced pricing strategies, including market-specific promotional pricing and subscription price localisation.
Markets Pro is priced as a percentage of international gross merchandise value — typically in the range of 5–7% depending on contract terms — which means it only makes financial sense at meaningful international revenue volumes. For most DTC brands at the internationalisation stage, standard Shopify Markets is sufficient. Markets Pro becomes relevant when international revenue is a significant portion of total revenue and the complexity of managing duties, local payment methods, and compliance manually justifies the cost.
10. When to use expansion stores instead
Expansion stores are separate Shopify stores, each with their own admin, domain, product catalogue, and checkout — typically set up for a specific market or region. Shopify Plus allows up to ten expansion stores under a single Shopify Plus contract, which is one of the most underutilised features of the plan for internationalising brands.
The case for expansion stores over Shopify Markets comes down to the degree of regional differentiation required. If your UK and US stores sell different product ranges, have different promotional calendars, require fundamentally different checkout experiences, or need independent subscription platform configurations, expansion stores give you complete separation and control. Shopify Markets, by contrast, is a single store with market-specific overlays — which means the underlying product catalogue, theme, and checkout logic is shared.
The practical disadvantage of expansion stores is operational overhead. Managing two or three stores independently means duplicating product updates, promotional changes, theme updates, and app configurations across each one. For brands without a dedicated development resource, this overhead is real and compounds over time.
One of the most common — and most overlooked — reasons to use expansion stores is default currency payout. Shopify Payments settles revenue in the currency of the store's primary market. A UK brand using a single Shopify Markets store will receive payouts in GBP, even if a significant proportion of revenue is coming from US customers paying in USD. For brands where multi-currency payout is commercially important — for example, a brand with US-based manufacturing costs or investors requiring USD reporting — a dedicated US expansion store with Shopify Payments configured for USD payout is the cleaner solution. Shopify Markets handles the customer-facing currency experience well, but it does not give you independent payout currencies per market.
The other practical consideration with expansion stores is app duplication. Every app installed on your primary store — your subscription platform, your review app, your loyalty programme, your Klaviyo integration — needs to be installed, configured, and maintained separately on each expansion store. For a brand running two or three expansion stores, that can mean three separate Recharge or Skio configurations, three Klaviyo integrations, and three sets of app subscription fees. This is not a reason to avoid expansion stores where they are genuinely needed, but it is a real operational and cost overhead that brands frequently underestimate at the planning stage.
For brands with significant B2B requirements alongside DTC — like Sabatino Truffles, whose three-store consolidation we managed across US consumer, EU consumer, and US/EU B2B — expansion stores allow each channel to operate with its own logic without compromise. The decision to use expansion stores rather than Shopify Markets was driven by the need for genuinely separate B2B pricing, trade account management, and US/EU product range differences that could not be handled cleanly within a single-store Markets configuration.
11. Shopify Markets vs expansion stores: which is right for you?
The decision framework comes down to four questions:
| Question | Shopify Markets | Expansion stores |
|---|---|---|
| Do all markets sell the same product range? | ✅ One catalogue, single platform config | ✅ Can differ per store |
| Is subscription logic consistent across markets? | ✅ Single platform config | ⚠️ Separate configs needed |
| Do markets need fundamentally different checkouts? | ⚠️ Limited differentiation | ✅ Fully independent |
| Do you have resource to maintain multiple stores? | ✅ Lower maintenance | ⚠️ Higher overhead |
| Do you need B2B and DTC channels separated? | ❌ Not designed for this | ✅ Clean separation |
| Is budget a constraint? | ✅ Included in Shopify plan | ⚠️ Requires Shopify Plus |
| Do you need payouts in multiple currencies (e.g. GBP and USD separately)? | ❌ Single payout currency only | ✅ Independent payout per store |
| Are you prepared to duplicate apps and configurations per store? | ✅ Single app setup | ⚠️ Each store needs separate app installs and fees |
For most DTC brands entering their first international market, Shopify Markets is the right starting point. It is lower cost, lower maintenance, and sufficient for the vast majority of cross-border selling requirements. Expansion stores become the right call when regional differentiation, B2B separation, or subscription platform complexity cannot be handled within a single-store Markets configuration.
12. International shipping and logistics
The storefront and checkout are only half the international equation. Fulfilment is where many brands underestimate the complexity — and where customer experience breaks down most visibly.
For brands shipping from a single UK fulfilment location, international shipping costs and delivery windows are the primary friction points. Customers in the US or Australia expect competitive delivery costs and clear timelines. High shipping costs on international orders are one of the leading causes of cart abandonment — particularly for food and drink DTC brands where the product price-to-weight ratio makes international shipping disproportionately expensive relative to order value.
Shopify Markets integrates with third-party logistics (3PL) providers and fulfilment apps, allowing brands to configure market-specific shipping rates, carrier preferences, and estimated delivery windows. For brands with meaningful international revenue, partnering with a regional 3PL — holding stock in the US or EU — typically delivers a step-change in shipping economics and delivery experience that cannot be achieved from a single UK fulfilment location.
For subscription brands specifically, international fulfilment complexity is compounded by recurring orders. A customer who subscribes in Germany expects consistent delivery intervals — which means your fulfilment operation needs to handle recurring shipments reliably across markets, not just one-time orders.
13. Benefits of Shopify Markets
Single store management. Currencies, languages, domains, and tax rates are all configured and managed from a unified Shopify admin. There is no need to log into separate store instances or duplicate product updates across multiple stores.
Shopify Payments integration. Multi-currency is handled natively through Shopify Payments, removing the need for third-party currency conversion apps or manual exchange rate management.
Reduced cart abandonment. Local currency display, localised checkout, and automatic tax calculation remove friction that causes international customers to abandon — particularly at checkout where currency uncertainty is most acute.
SEO-friendly architecture. Shopify Markets supports hreflang tags, localised URLs, and market-specific sitemaps — giving you the technical foundation for international organic search visibility.
Scalability. Adding a new market in Shopify Markets is significantly faster than building a new expansion store. For brands with a clear international growth roadmap, the ability to activate new markets without new development work is a genuine operational advantage.
14. Limitations of Shopify Markets
Requires Shopify Payments for multi-currency. Brands on third-party payment providers cannot use native multi-currency through Shopify Markets. This is a significant constraint for brands in markets where Shopify Payments is not available or where local payment providers are commercially necessary.
Shared product catalogue. All markets share the same product catalogue, variant structure, and inventory. If your international markets require fundamentally different product ranges, Shopify Markets creates structural complexity that expansion stores avoid.
Limited checkout differentiation. Standard Shopify Markets has limited ability to present a fundamentally different checkout experience per market. Brands with complex B2B, trade, or market-specific checkout requirements will hit this ceiling.
Translation quality. Shopify Markets provides the infrastructure for translation — not the translation itself. You still need to source, edit, and maintain translated content per market, which has ongoing resource implications that brands often underestimate at the outset.
Subscription complexity. Subscription platform behaviour within Shopify Markets can be unpredictable depending on your platform and market configuration. This is one area where taking advice from an experienced subscription ecommerce agency before committing to an architecture saves significant time in remediation later.
15. How to get started with international selling on Shopify
Step 1 — Validate demand before building. Use Shopify Analytics and Google Analytics to confirm international visitor volume and identify where organic demand already exists. Enter markets where you have evidence of latent demand, not just strategic aspiration.
Step 2 — Choose your architecture. For most brands entering one or two markets, Shopify Markets is the right starting point. If your requirements include B2B separation, different product ranges, or independent subscription configurations, plan for expansion stores from the outset — retrofitting is significantly harder than building correctly the first time.
Step 3 — Configure Shopify Markets. Set up your target market in the Shopify admin under Settings → Markets. Configure the currency, language, domain structure, and tax settings for that market. Test the end-to-end purchase flow from a VPN set to your target market before going live.
Step 4 — Localise the high-intent pages first. Full store translation is expensive and time-consuming. Start with product pages, the cart, checkout, and order confirmation emails — the pages where language friction most directly affects conversion. Extend to full store translation once the economics of the market are proven.
Step 5 — Sort shipping and fulfilment before driving traffic. International marketing spend is wasted if the shipping cost or delivery window at checkout kills conversion. Get your shipping economics right before investing in paid media or SEO for international markets.
Step 6 — Implement hreflang correctly. If you are using market-specific domains or subdomains, hreflang implementation is non-negotiable. Incorrect or missing hreflang tags will cause Google to serve the wrong version of your store to international visitors and cannibalise your domestic rankings.
If you are planning an international expansion on Shopify and want to make sure the architecture, subscription setup, and technical configuration are right from the outset, we can help. We have built and consolidated international Shopify Plus stores across food, drink, and wellness categories — including multi-market, multi-currency, and B2B setups on a single platform.