The global e-commerce market is expected to experience rapid growth in the coming years, with a projected compound annual growth rate of 14.7% from 2020 to 2027. According to this research study, in 2021, the revenue from retail e-commerce in the United States reached $768 billion, which is predicted to surpass $1.3 trillion by 2025. As a merchant, it's natural to want to tap into this growth potential and expand your e-commerce business internationally. However, this can come with its own challenges, such as navigating different laws and regulations, handling duties and taxes, and managing other cross-border trade complexities.
Shopify Markets is here to help. This cross-border e-commerce solution empowers businesses to sell in multiple countries and supports international growth. It helps identify new markets and provides the tools to set up, launch, optimize, and manage a cross-border e-commerce store. With Shopify Markets, you can centralize your international selling efforts and offer customized online shopping experiences for customers based on their location. This includes localized language and currency options, giving your international shoppers an intuitive and seamless browsing and purchasing experience. Explore how Shopify Markets can help you break into new markets and expand your e-commerce business globally.
Things to know before using Shopify Markets
Before you start using Shopify Markets to expand your e-commerce business into new markets, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
- Shopify Payments: To leverage Shopify Markets to its fullest, you need to have Shopify Payments enabled. Shopify Payments is available only to stores in certain countries.
- Pay Additional Cross-border Fees: A cross-border fee is a credit card processing fee charged to merchants when a customer pays them from a credit card issued by an international bank.
For example, if a customer in Europe has a credit card issued by a local bank and they are using that card for an e-commerce transaction with an Indian merchant, the Indian merchant has to pay the cross-border fees.
Enabling Shopify Markets with other currencies comes with an additional cross-border fee. While the fee may be negligible for small brands, it can become significant for stores with millions in sales. You need to factor this cost into your pricing structure to avoid unpleasant surprises.
Key Components of Shopify Markets
International selling comes with its own set of complexities, but Shopify Markets is equipped with a range of features to make the process easier. Here are some of the key features that will help you understand the platform and set it up to sell in multiple countries:
Domains
When merchants want to expand to different markets, it can be a hassle to buy and manage domains for each regional market, such as .cn for China or .fr for France. Shopify Markets helps merchants get localized domains for all key countries and regions.
- Localized domains act as a strong trust signal for international consumers.
- These domains help in improving search rankings for the region.
- It allows to create customized content based on the unique needs of each region.
- With Shopify Markets, you can create international web addresses or URLs for different countries.
- Get multiple options to set up your international domains.
- Choose a domain name for a specific country (e.g., UAE) or an entire region (e.g., Middle East).
Languages
Customers always prefer to view informational content in their local language. With Shopify Markets, you can also create local versions of your online store based on the local language of your target market.
- In addition to the language, you can customize the branding for your store to suit local preferences.
- Note that you need a theme that supports selling in multiple languages.
- If you are using a third-party theme, you may have to check its compatibility with theme developers.
- Merchants can also benefit from the Shopify Translate and Adapt app.
- It offers many unique features, such as free auto-translation for up to two languages.
- It also simplifies the editing process as translators can edit the local content side by side with the source content.
- The solution also allows you to import manual translations.
Shopify Geolocation
Setting up unique URLs for each region is the first step towards localization. You also need to make it easy for your customers to find their regional websites. Shopify Geolocation helps your customers find your regional e-commerce store with ease.
- Geolocation is a free app from Shopify Markets.
- It recommends countries and languages to customers based on parameters, such as their location, browser, or default device language.
- This app also allows you to include a country and language selector in your website’s footer. It further lets customers choose their preferred region and language.
Localized Pricing
Pricing for international markets is a major challenge for merchants when setting up international stores online. Shopify Markets gives freedom to merchants from these challenges and makes localized pricing seamless.
- It allows merchants to factor in export costs related to shipping, tariffs, and duties.
- It removes the administrative hassles of managing multiple currencies and markets.
Merchants get two options to offer localized pricing to their customers:
- Option 1: An automatic conversion from the default currency to the local currency based on the prevailing exchange rate
- Option 2: Manual setting of customized prices for each market
In addition, you can set different product prices for each country or region.
Taxes
International shipping may involve additional duties and taxes for customers, which they may have to pay upon receiving their shipment. With Shopify Markets, you can charge the applicable duties and import taxes right at checkout, and avoid any surprises to your customers.
- Only certain Shopify merchants can benefit from taxes-related features of Shopify Markets.
- Merchants should meet certain requirements to be able to charge duties and import taxes during checkout.
- For example, only merchants with Advanced Shopify or the Shopify Plus plan can add these charges.
- You can find more about these requirements here.
Fulfillment
Shopify Markets offers an end-to-end solution that simplifies international fulfilment. It reduces the pain of dealing with warehouses and agencies in different countries.
- International fulfillment is much more challenging than local fulfillment.
- With Shopify Markets Pro, you can fulfill your orders directly in your Shopify admin.
- You can do so by buying DHL Express shipping labels or by using third-party fulfillment partners.
- You can also automate your order fulfillment using Global-e’s shipping API.
- With Shopify Markets, you can offer two-day delivery to your customers verified by Shop Promise.
- Get simple pricing with no upfront costs, easy product returns, inventory management, product storage, and timely delivery.
Shipping
Shopify Markets eases international shipping-related challenges of merchants by providing a complete shipping solution.
- In international shipping, merchants have to worry about several factors such as:
- Risks of counterfeiting and theft
- Lack of timely updates on the shipment status
- Delays in custom clearance
- Weather conditions
- Unique shipping regulations of each country
- When you use Shopify Shipping to buy shipping labels, you’ll be provided with the necessary customs documentation needed to fulfill international shipments.
- Learn more about how you can add countries and regions that you add to your shipping zones.
Payment Gateway
Shopify Markets recommends the most popular payment methods for a particular region.
- International customers have diverse payment preferences.
- While PayPal and credit card payments are widely used in the US, remaining markets have other popular modes of payment.
- With the integration of Shopify Payments, merchants can accept payments in different currencies, including cryptocurrencies.With Shopify Markets Pro*, Global-e acts as your merchant of record.
- It manages all the complexities of selling in other countries on your behalf.
- These complexities can be anything from using local methods of payment to managing duties and import taxes.
*Shopify Markets Pro is in early access as of now and is only available to certain merchants.
Why Shopify Markets?
Shopify Markets is a market leader in helping e-commerce merchants sell to multiple countries and scale their businesses. It is a part of Shopify, which empowers 800,000+ businesses across 175 countries. With Shopify Markets, merchants get a one-stop solution to grow their international business.
Shopify Markets is available under 3 plans: Basic, Shopify, and Advanced.
Start your free trial of Shopify Markets today.References:
