Selling products beyond your home country is a huge growth opportunity for ecommerce brands. Thankfully, Shopify recognizes this and now offers powerful international sales tools to make global expansion easier. 

With Shopify Markets, you can manage multi-country storefronts, currencies, and localized experiences all from one Shopify store. Whether you’re testing demand in new regions or optimizing a mature global strategy, this tool makes it easy to manage it all from one dashboard. For brands ready to offload the legal and logistical heavy lifting, Shopify Managed Markets acts as your outsourced international team, handling taxes, compliance, and more.

In this guide, we’ll break down all of Shopify’s cross-border features, explain how they work, and how to leverage them for your brand’s international sales success. 

What is Shopify Markets?

Formerly referred to as Shopify’s cross-border selling solution, Shopify Markets was officially unveiled as their built-in solution for cross-border commerce in Summer 2024. Available on all plan levels, it acts as an “all-in-one” toolkit that localizes storefronts, handles currencies, calculates duties/taxes, and simplifies global shipping from a single store admin.

How Does Shopify Markets Work?

Prior to the launch of Markets, an account’s B2B, cross-border, and POS functionality/settings were spread out across the admin. Now, everything exists in one space, making it much easier and more intuitive to set up and customize a new market for your store. 

In practical terms, here’s what Shopify Markets offers to merchants:

Unified Multi-Market Management

 Instead of running separate stores for each country, you use one Shopify store to serve multiple “markets” (e.g. U.S., EU, APAC). Each Shopify region market can have its own language, currency, pricing, catalogues, local tax, and domain settings, but you manage them centrally. 

Each region market can also have submarkets attached to it, allowing you to go even deeper into your customizations. For example, you can customize your European market for French buyers, who will then receive a localized version of your store tailored to their needs. 

Localized Storefronts

Shopify Markets allows you to translate your store into multiple languages and even customize content by market. For example, you might show different homepage banners or product descriptions for the UK vs. Germany. Shopify’s built-in Translate & Adapt app or third-party translation apps help create multilingual storefronts tailored to each region’s language. 

Announced more recently in Shopify’s Summer ‘25 Editions showcase, and currently available in developer preview, also comes the addition of theme selection on a per-market basis, meaning that you can have a completely different store theme attached to each new market you create.  

Local Currencies & Pricing

With Shopify Markets, you can sell in over 130 local currencies using Shopify Payments. Prices can be automatically converted based on current exchange rates, with options to add price adjustments or rounded pricing rules per market. 

You can even set custom product pricing by market for strategic differences in certain regions. This cross-border pricing flexibility ensures your pricing is both competitive and profitable in each target market.

Duties & Import Taxes at Checkout

To avoid delivery surprises, Shopify Markets lets you calculate and collect duties and import taxes right at checkout for international orders made on your online store. With Avalara’s partnership with Shopify, you can display an estimated or guaranteed landed cost so customers know all fees upfront. This improves transparency and can reduce cart abandonment from global customers. 

International Domains & SEO

Expanding globally is easier when your store can live on localized domains or subfolders for each market. Shopify Markets enables you to map custom domains (like yourstore.ca or yourstore.co.uk) or use subfolders (such as yourstore.com/fr, /de) for different regions. It also automatically adds SEO tags, like hreflang, so search engines serve the correct regional site. 

In combination with Shopify’s Geolocation app, you can nudge customers to the correct language and domain based on their location, creating custom experiences when you expand internationally. 

Payments & Checkout 

Shopify Markets works with Shopify Payments to offer local payment options. Shoppers can pay in their local currency with familiar methods (credit cards, Apple Pay, etc.), and Shopify will payout to you in your base currency. While the standard setup covers most major payment methods, remember that some country-specific methods might require additional apps or Shopify’s advanced features. 

New in Summer ‘25 is the ability to link different bank accounts to different markets, a step up from the previous limit of two, regardless of the number of markets set up. With Shopify Payments, you can receive payouts to a domestic bank account for each of your entities, in the entity's domestic currency.

Overall, when it comes to Shopify, international sales/expansion is easy and straightforward. Shopify Markets is a unified cross-border commerce hub. It gives you one place to configure everything for international selling and monitor market sales performance. For a brand founder or ecommerce lead, this means less time jumping between multiple stores and more time optimizing one more powerful global store.

How to Activate Markets in Shopify

One of the biggest draws and benefits to the new Markets experience is that everything is configured and managed in one place. From your Shopify Admin Settings, head to the “Markets” tab and click “Add market”. From there, select a country, group of countries, or even a region (such as “Europe”, “North America”, etc). Name your new market and save to access the settings page for it. 

Here, you can set up your languages & domains, currencies, duties & import taxes, shipping rates, and payments. This is also where you will be able to take a quick look at that market’s performance once you activate it and people begin to browse and shop. 

Once you have all your defaults set up, you can optimize your product availability, price adjustments and exchange rate settings from the “Products and pricing” page. You might want to exclude products that aren’t compliant or relevant – such as alcohol in dry regions, for example – in certain markets. You could also increase pricing on your whole store, or per item, depending on the local market/competition.

Shopify’s preview mode then allows you to visit your store as a shopper from this new market to ensure everything is priced and behaving how you expect it to, before activating your store from the market’s main settings page. 

Shopify Managed Markets (Markets Pro): Taking International Sales Further

While Shopify Markets provides the toolkit to sell globally, Shopify Managed Markets (formerly Shopify Markets Pro) is an add-on service that supercharges your international operations. It’s essentially a partnership between Shopify and Global-e that introduces a “merchant of record” model for your international orders. Here’s what that means and why it’s a big deal:

1. Merchant of Record Service: In a standard Shopify Markets setup, you (the merchant) are the merchant of record for all sales, even international. That means you are legally responsible for each sale in every jurisdiction—handling foreign taxes, compliance, and any fraud issues. With Managed Markets, Global-e becomes the merchant of record for international orders. They take on the legal and financial responsibilities of selling into each country, so you don’t need to register for taxes abroad or worry about local laws. For a growing brand, this removes a huge administrative burden. Global-e will handle VAT/GST filings, ensure products meet import regulations, and act like an “overseas seller” on your behalf.

2. All-Inclusive Duties & Tax Compliance: Managed Markets handles international duties and taxes with full automation. All import fees are calculated and prepaid at checkout, then remitted to the proper authorities for you. Essentially, your customer sees a guaranteed landed cost and pays it at checkout. Global-e/Shopify ensure that money gets to the right government for customs or tax. This leads to faster delivery and no COD surprises for customers. 

3. Local Payment Methods & Currencies: Managed Markets opens up a wider array of local payment options for shoppers. Beyond what Shopify Payments normally offers, customers can pay with region-specific methods like Klarna, Sofort, local debit networks, etc., depending on their country. You can accept 130+ currencies, and every transaction is automatically protected against fraud and chargebacks – a major plus for high-risk international orders.

4. Discounted Global Shipping & Logistics Support: When using Managed Markets, you can access Shopify’s negotiated international shipping rates with carriers like DHL and UPS. Labels can be purchased right in Shopify, and shipping includes features like customs pre-clearance and address validation. Global-e also ensures you’re not shipping prohibited items to countries where they’re restricted—the result: simpler fulfillment and often faster delivery worldwide, without you needing separate logistics contracts.

5. Simplified Returns & Currency Risk Management: Handling returns from overseas can be tricky. Managed Markets helps by providing a local returns address in certain regions and controlling the process of returning products across borders. Additionally, they protect you from currency volatility. If you refund an order, it’s done at the original conversion rate for up to 30 days, so you’re not losing money if exchange rates shift. This stability in foreign transactions is something merchants usually have to hedge themselves but Managed Markets does for you.

In short, Shopify Managed Markets is like getting an outsourced international department for your business. You pay a bit extra in fees, but you gain peace of mind and speed – compliance, payments, shipping, and even fraud prevention are primarily handled by Shopify and Global-e. 

Currently, Managed Markets is available to merchants based in the continental U.S. only. It’s also a feature that users must apply for, so you’ll need to be ready to wait for your store to be reviewed and approved before you can access these capabilities. 

If you’re outside the U.S., you can still use Shopify Markets’ standard features globally, but you would need to handle the added complexities yourself (or with an ecommerce agency) or with third-party solutions.

There are also a few changes that Managed Markets will make to your store when activated like product catalogue being automatically classified with Harmonized System (HS) codes and adjusted for restrictions by country, and your product pricing being increased slightly to account for currency conversion fees. You can review all of the changes Managed Markets will make to your store in Shopify’s Help Center. 

Shopify Markets vs. Shopify Managed Markets

So, which approach is right for your business: the standard Shopify Markets or the full-service Managed Markets? It often depends on your scale, budget, and business location. 

Shopify Markets is a robust set of tools to get started with international selling. This is ideal for merchants who want control and are willing to manage compliance and logistics as they grow. Shopify Managed Markets, on the other hand, is a more “hands-off” expansion service: you pay extra fees, and in return, a lot of heavy lifting is done for you by Shopify’s partner (Global-e). 

Many growing brands start with Shopify Markets to test the waters in new countries, then upgrade to Managed Markets once volume increases or complexities become too time-consuming. 

Other Shopify Cross-Border Features to Leverage

Beyond the primary Markets framework, Shopify offers a few additional tools and features that are key to international sales success.

• Shopify Geolocation App: This free app by Shopify is a simple way to enhance your storefront for international visitors. It automatically recommends the appropriate country and language to a visitor based on their location. 

• Multi-Language and Multi-Currency Checkout: Shopify Markets combined with Shopify Payments allows multi-currency checkout, meaning customers pay in their chosen currency and you get paid in yours. 

• Duties and Tax Settings: In Shopify admin under Settings > Taxes and duties, even if you’re not on Managed Markets, you should configure your preferences for international tax handling. Shopify lets you choose to collect VAT for EU/UK, enable IOSS for EU (for Plus merchants or via third-party), and decide on duty collection for other countries. Using these settings in tandem with Markets ensures a more compliant operation. 

• Shopify Apps for Global Selling: While Shopify Markets covers a lot natively, you can further extend functionality with apps. Examples include translation apps if you need advanced control beyond Shopify’s Translate & Adapt, and international SEO apps that help manage hreflang tags if you run multiple domains. If you’re not using Managed Markets, apps like Zonos Duty and Tax or FlavorCloud can provide duty calculations and international shipping solutions.

• Shopify Plus Expansion Stores: One related feature to mention is that Shopify Plus merchants still have the option to use expansion stores for international markets. This was the old approach before Markets existed, and it can still make sense in certain cases, such as when you need completely separate storefronts with unique inventory or if you operate different brands per region. That said, Shopify’s direction lately is towards consolidating with Markets unless a separate store is truly justified. I

By using the above features in combination with Shopify Markets' capabilities, even a smaller brand can present a great, localized shopping experience with minimal friction at checkout for international buyers. 

Conclusion

Shopify Markets makes cross-border selling easy by centralizing localization, pricing, and compliance tools, letting you launch in new regions faster than ever. For businesses prioritizing speed and simplicity, Shopify Managed Markets takes it a step further, outsourcing legal complexities and logistics so you can focus on growth.

As a Shopify Plus Partner agency, we at Blue Badger can help you tailor your Markets setup to your brand’s goals, whether you’re optimizing currency rounding for European shoppers, configuring geo-specific domains, or integrating with Managed Markets. Get in touch with us today to learn more about global expansion with Shopify.