Why Global Brands are Using Shopify Markets in 2025

There are plenty of reasons why we love Shopify here at Storetasker, but probably the biggest of all is this: it doesn’t restrict your growth. Shopify doesn’t just let you sell across multiple channels – it makes it easy to scale across various countries and territories, with Shopify Markets.

Why is that important? Because in ecommerce, global growth is (usually) pretty natural.

You wake up one morning and realize half your abandoned carts are coming from outside your home country. Germany. Australia. Canada. You didn’t run ads there. You didn’t plan to expand there. But your customers still found you – and you don’t want to lose them.

So the scramble starts. You start asking: 

• “How do we localize for those markets?”
• “Should we launch a new Shopify store?”
• “Do we need translators? Currency converters? A lawyer?”

With Shopify Markets, there’s no need to panic. You can spin up a new market within your existing Shopify account, localize the experience for a specific target audience, and grow seamlessly, without the headaches. Here’s exactly why growing brands are taking advantage of this in 2025 – and how you can get started with Shopify Markets yourself.

So, What Is Shopify Markets?

Shopify Markets is Shopify’s built-in way to sell internationally without having to create (and manage) multiple stores. That’s it at a high level. But here’s what that actually means in practice:

You can set up different “Markets” inside your Shopify admin: say, Canada, the EU, and Australia, and then customize the experience for each one. Local currency. Local language. Local pricing. Local products (yep, you can hide certain SKUs from some countries). Even local domains, if you want to get fancy with SEO.

You do it all from one backend.

What used to take multiple Shopify stores, four different apps, and a spreadsheet nightmare of SKUs and redirects? Now it’s managed in a single dashboard. You can literally click into “Markets,” set your preferences, and Shopify handles the rest: currency conversion, geo-detection, redirects, rounding rules. All of it. 

Want to take it a step further? That’s where Shopify Markets Pro (now Managed Markets) comes in. It adds automatic tax and duty calculations, import fees, international compliance, and more. In other words, it handles the bureaucratic chaos you never wanted to deal with in the first place.

It’s worth calling out: this isn’t some beta feature Shopify’s testing in a corner. In 2025, Shopify Markets is core infrastructure. It’s getting smarter, faster, and deeper every quarter. Shopify’s goal is clear: they want global selling to be the default. No extra store needed. No agency required (unless your situation’s super complex).

How Does Shopify Markets Work?

Let’s say someone in Germany stumbles onto your store. They don’t speak English, their credit card is in euros, and they’re not expecting to pay a surprise €19 import fee at checkout.

Without Shopify Markets? You’d probably need a separate Shopify store, a translator, a currency converter app, and a few headaches later you might end up with something that’s half-working. 

With Shopify Markets, the experience looks very different, because the platform handles most of the heavy lifting for you.

At its core, Shopify Markets functions like a control center for cross-border commerce. You define different “Markets” in your Shopify admin: these can be individual countries or logical groups (e.g., “European Union,” “North America,” “Asia-Pacific”).

From there, each Market becomes its own localized storefront, without actually needing a separate Shopify store. You get: 

• Currency and price logic: Shopify detects where a customer is, and shows them prices in their local currency. You can set prices manually or let Shopify auto-convert them using current exchange rates. There’s even smart rounding (no weird decimals).
• Language and content: You can assign translations to each Market, either through auto-translate or custom input. That includes product names, collection titles, checkout copy, and SEO metadata. Shopify also supports separate domains or subfolders for each language-market pair, which is a big deal for SEO.
• Product visibility: You can choose which products or collections show up in which Markets. This is great for managing region-specific stock, legal limitations, or seasonal bundles.
• Redirects and routing: Shopify uses GeoIP to detect a visitor’s location and guide them to the right Market. You can show a popup, auto-redirect, or keep it subtle. 
• Duties, taxes, and compliance: With Shopify Managed Markets, Shopify even handles international tax rules and pre-calculates duties at checkout. That means fewer surprise fees for customers, and fewer abandoned carts for you.

The beauty is in the centralization. Instead of juggling five admin panels or ten apps, you get one streamlined place to manage your global presence.

The Benefits of Shopify Markets for Ecommerce Brands

For most companies, selling internationally has always sounded good. Bigger audience. More revenue. Global reach. But in practice? It’s usually a mess.

Before Shopify Markets, going global meant spinning up multiple stores, juggling tax settings, praying your apps didn’t break, and losing sleep over whether your French customers were seeing English checkout buttons.

Now, brands are discovering they can go international without hiring a localization agency (though experts are still handy) or managing five backends. Let’s break down the benefits. 

One Store, Global Reach

This is the biggest shift. You don’t need a new store for every country. You can run your U.S., UK, EU, and APAC storefronts from one Shopify account. One product catalog, one dashboard, and one wonderfully connected team. 

That means no more duplicated themes, mismatched inventory, or “Oh wait, we forgot to update the Australian store” confusion. For lean teams especially, this is important. You spend less time managing logistics and more time selling.

Localized Customer Experience

Want to know what kills international conversion? Making people do mental gymnastics.

If I land on your site in Tokyo, I don’t want to see prices in dollars, descriptions in English, and shipping rates in pounds. That feels janky. It makes me bounce.

Shopify Markets fixes that. You can localize everything, currency, language, product visibility, so each customer feels like the site was made for them.

Customization isn’t just cosmetic either. Local domains (or subfolders) translated product names, and regionalized pricing all play a direct role in conversion rate. You can build truly custom experiences, and those lead to higher conversions. 

Simplified Duties & Tax Handling

International customers hate one thing more than long shipping times: unexpected fees.

If someone in France adds $100 worth of candles to their cart, but sees an extra €28 import fee at checkout, guess what they do? They bail. In fact, 47% of shoppers abandon carts specifically because of unexpected fees at checkout. 

Shopify Managed Markets helps avoid that. It calculates taxes and duties upfront and shows them to the customer before they checkout. It also handles compliance in the background. You don’t need to memorize VAT rules or set up third-party integrations. That’s a massive relief.

Smarter SEO for International Markets

When you’re trying to rank in multiple countries, SEO gets tricky. You need country-specific URLs, proper hreflang tags, localized metadata, and most stores just don’t get it right.

With Shopify Markets, you can:

• Use subfolders (like /fr, /de, /au) or separate domains (fr.brand.com)
• Assign translated titles, meta descriptions, and product names
• Make sure Google indexes the right version in the right market

That means when someone in Germany searches for “beste Duftkerzen,” your product page in German (with euros, not dollars) shows up first, not your U.S. homepage with a three-second redirect lag.

Manual Price Adjustments by Market

Here’s a sneaky powerful feature: price overrides. Let’s say your margins are tighter in Canada because of shipping costs. Or maybe your U.S. audience is used to $39.99, but in the UK, £39.99 would kill conversions.

Shopify Markets lets you override prices by region, without using a third-party app or duplicating your product catalog. It’s simple, clean, and strategic.

You can even apply automatic rounding rules, so prices feel “local.” That’s a detail that boosts trust more than you’d think.

Fewer Apps, Less Bloat, More Speed

Before Markets, the average cross-border store was Frankenstein’s monster. Currency converter here. Language switcher there. Redirect app over top. Every layer slowed down your site, made your code harder to manage, and broke the moment Shopify rolled out a new update.

Now? Most of that gets handled natively. It’s faster, safer, and way more scalable.

Fewer apps usually means faster load times, which directly improves conversion. It’s not just a technical win; it’s a business one.

Custom Catalogs per Region

Got products that can’t ship to certain places? Or SKUs you only want to promote in specific markets?

Shopify Markets lets you show or hide products by region. That’s a massive advantage when you’re dealing with local regulations, seasonal drops, or fulfillment restrictions.

One brand I worked with had battery-powered products that couldn’t ship by air. With Markets, we excluded them from the EU without creating a second store or breaking inventory tracking.

The Challenges of Shopify Markets

Shopify Markets is powerful, but it’s not perfect. It solves a ton of international selling problems, but it also introduces a few new ones, especially if you’re running a fast-moving store or using lots of third-party tools.

Here’s what you should watch out for:

• App compatibility: Not every app plays nicely with Shopify Markets, especially apps that touch checkout, currency, or product visibility. Some bundling tools still assume a single currency. Certain loyalty programs can’t handle localized rules. Even translation apps may overwrite Market settings or break when paired with Shopify’s native Translate & Adapt.
• Auto-translation issues: Yes, Shopify can auto-translate your store into multiple languages. And yes, it’s faster than hiring a full localization team. But auto-translations can butcher product names, miss brand nuance, or create weird phrasing that makes you look less polished than you are. 
• GeoIP problems: Shopify’s native geolocation tools work, but they’re basic. Sometimes they don’t redirect users correctly. Sometimes they show the wrong currency or language and force people to click a popup.
• SEO Needs attention: When you enable Markets with subfolders (/fr, /de, etc.), you’re creating new indexed versions of your site. That’s great for SEO, if you do it right. But if you forget to localize metadata, set up hreflang tags correctly, or avoid duplicate content? You could accidentally confuse Google and hurt your rankings across the board.
• Product Feed and Ads Management Mess:  Once you start customizing products, prices, and catalogs by Market, your ad feeds (Google Shopping, Meta, Pinterest) get a lot more complex. You’ll need to manage different feeds per Market, track performance by region, and make sure your product data matches what’s shown on-site. 

These issues don’t mean you can’t use Markets. But you’ll want a dev (or Storetasker expert) to help optimize your setup. 

How to Get Started with Shopify Markets

If you’re ready to start selling internationally with Shopify Markets, don’t worry, you don’t need to migrate your store, hire a localization agency, or launch in 20 countries at once.

You do need a plan, and a little patience. Shopify makes the setup surprisingly smooth once you understand where everything lives in the admin. Here’s a quick and simple guide. 

Step 1: Head to Settings, then Markets

You’ll already have a Primary Market set up: usually your home country. Click “Add Market” to begin setting up a new one. When you do, Shopify automatically groups all unassigned countries into a default “Rest of World” Market. If you’re only targeting specific regions (say, UK and EU), go ahead and restrict access to everywhere else. 

You don’t want random overseas traffic ending up in a half-configured storefront. Name your Markets clearly: “UK,” “EU (Excl. UK),” “Canada”, so it’s easy to manage down the line.

Step 2: Decide Whether to Group or Separate Countries

You can group multiple countries into a single Market (like “Europe”) or split them into individual Markets (like “France,” “Germany,” “Spain”).

Grouped Markets make sense if the customer experience is basically the same across those countries. But if you want custom pricing, products, and domains for each country, you’ll need to split them up. My advice is to start simple, with one new market, and expand later. 

Step 3: Set Your Currency & Pricing Rules

Shopify supports:

• Automatic conversion (based on daily exchange rates)
• Manual price overrides (for full control by Market)

Manual pricing is especially useful if:

• You have regional differences in demand, shipping costs, or margin
• You want to localize pricing psychology (e.g., £39.99 vs. $49.99)
• You run different promos by Market

You can also enable smart rounding, so customers don’t see weird totals like €28.73.

Step 4: Add and Publish Translations

Install the free Translate & Adapt app to manage your language content. It supports both manual and automatic translation, for product pages, collection titles, checkout labels, and more. But remember, translations don’t show up until you publish the language.

To do that:

• Go to Settings then Languages
• Click Add Language
• Choose your language(s), then click Publish

Without this step, your translations won’t appear even if you’ve added them.

Step 5: Assign Products by Market

Inside each Market, you can choose which products or collections are visible.

This is super helpful if:

• You want to test products regionally
• Some items can’t be shipped internationally
• You’re running seasonal or regional promos

Don’t overthink it. Start with your core products, then refine as you learn what works in each region.

Step 6: Configure Your Domain Structure

Each Market can live on:

• A subfolder (e.g., brand.com/fr)
• A subdomain (fr.brand.com)
• A custom domain (brand.fr)

For most stores, subfolders are the best balance of SEO, simplicity, and control. They’re easier to manage, help consolidate domain authority, and keep all Markets under one roof.

If you’re using multiple languages within a Market (e.g. French and English in Canada), Shopify will create nested subfolders like /fr-ca and /en-ca - don’t worry, it’s all handled automatically.

Step 7: Set Up Taxes, Duties, and Shopping Zones

If you’re using Shopify Managed Markets, this part is basically handled for you. It will show duties and import taxes at checkout, which is huge for conversion.

If not, you’ll need to manually configure tax settings and include clear messaging in your policies about potential customs fees.

One thing to keep in mind: just because a Market is active doesn’t mean customers can actually place an order. If you haven’t added that country to a Shipping Zone under Settings and Shipping and Delivery, checkout will fail.

Step 8: Test Everything with a VPN or Preview Tool

Before going live, simulate customer behavior in your new Market. Use a VPN (or a tool like Orbe’s Market Preview) to walk through:

• Homepage
• Navigation
• Product pages
• Cart and checkout
• Order confirmation

Look for mismatches in language, currency, product availability, and delivery options.

If something looks off, fix it now, not after a confused international customer emails your support team at 2 a.m.

Making the Most of Shopify Markets with Storetasker

Shopify Markets is powerful, but it’s not automatic.

Yes, it removes the need for multiple storefronts. Yes, it centralizes your pricing, languages, and taxes. But getting everything set up well? That takes skill.

That’s where Storetasker comes in. When you’re going global, you don’t need a $20K agency or a months-long discovery phase to get started. You just need a vetted Shopify expert who knows how to:

• Configure Markets without tanking your SEO
• Translate content without ruining your theme
• Sync product feeds without overloading your ad account
• Set up redirect logic without killing your UX

On Storetasker, you can scope that exact project, get matched with someone who’s done it before, and set up in no time. When you’re ready to scale, your freelancer can help with that too.

Ready to dive into global selling?

Get matched with a Storetasker expert today.