Are you looking to expand your eCommerce business internationally? This is a big (and exciting!) decision. Selling your products abroad can be a little complex, but it’s made a lot easier with Shopify Markets. So what is Shopify Markets, and how can you use it when you start selling abroad?
Let’s learn about what Shopify Markets is, then explore some of its key features and how you can use them.
What is Shopify Markets?
Shopify is one of the most widely used eCommerce CMS platforms. It offers convenience and ease of use, and is a great way to set up and establish a new website if you wish to sell products online. It is especially popular with small and medium-sized businesses, thanks to its ease of use, affordable pricing and functionality.
Shopify isn’t the only eCommerce platform out there – check out our evaluation of the top CMS platforms for eCommerce, complete with their pros and cons.
Now, as your business expands, you might decide you want to begin selling your wares abroad. Before Shopify Markets was launched in 2021, businesses would need to create multiple localised storefronts or partner with a third-party retailer if they want to have geographically-localised content and currency – which made selling internationally much harder. But this all changed with the release of Shopify Markets. Businesses are now able to sell more easily to international consumers and avoid currency conversion, import taxes, and translation issues.
Shopify Markets is built primarily for international selling. It features one centralised dashboard that allows you to easily roll out products to new markets with limited development, making admin operations much less complex. Let’s explore Shopify Markets’ key features in a bit more depth.
Pricing in local currencies
Shopify Markets has 133 currency options to allow your international customers to shop in their local currency. According to Charle, selling in a local currency can reduce cart abandonment rate by 33%, since a large portion of global customers are put off buying in foreign currencies on eCommerce websites.
With Shopify Markets, your storefront prices will automatically be adjusted and rounded based on the latest exchange rates. What is more, the checkout process, notifications, and refund processes are also shown in the local currency, taking out a lot of the hassle of international selling. Shopify Markets provides a consistent multi-currency shopping experience for customers across the world, so they can have confidence when purchasing from your business.
Localization and translation
According to a recent survey by CSA research, 40% of people are less likely to buy from an online store where pages are written in a foreign language. These findings indicate the vital importance for businesses of having a proper translation in order to improve sales and the overall shopping experience for international customers.
To solve this problem, you can install a third-party integration app with your Shopify Market to translate your store content and copy to a local language. You can set up different languages for each of your stores, so there’s no need to create a separate store for each country or region you’re selling to!
Duties and import taxes
Taxes and duties are a part of the deal when selling internationally, which often results in price fluctuations. But with Shopify Markets, tax and duty fees are automatically calculated at the checkout. Customers are made aware of what these costs are, so they can expect total clarity on these fees and avoid any delivery problems or additional charges when receiving their orders. An important thing to note is that a fee of 0.85% per transaction will be taken from the seller when tax and duty fees are calculated with Shopify Payments.
Localised domain name
Having an international domain for your business can boost your SEO and increase your organic reach. It can also help to improve your credibility and increase conversions. And, once again, Shopify Markets enables you to create region or country-specific domains easily. It also offers the option of creating a subdomain or a country-specific domain. Once you’ve chosen your regional domain strategy, Shopify Markets will automatically generate SEO tags to help you get found in the search results in your target country. Shopify Markets will also direct your international customers to the right domain based on their IP address location.
Payment Methods
With Shopify Markets, your business can offer direct and secure payment methods to customers abroad. On top of that, it also allows better control of your international pricing strategy through setting a specific price per market. The payment methods offered by Shopify Markets vary from debit and credit cards, through to bank transfers, and third-party apps like PayPal.
This is especially important because international customers need to be able to trust and have access to whichever payment method they prefer, and this might differ from country to country. Using a familiar payment method can make the difference between customers checking out or abandoning their shopping cart.
Once again, do note that there is a seller fee for using an alternative payment provider, which is charged at 1.5% for each transaction (and 2% per transaction when a currency is converted).
Inventory and fulfilment with international orders
Businesses with multiple inventory locations around the world are now able to sell their products to their chosen market based on where their inventory is located. For example, if you have a warehouse in the UK to fulfil orders in Europe, and another warehouse in the US to fulfil orders in the North America region, your European customers will only be able to see inventory from your UK warehouse. This ensures that inventory levels are managed separately to avoid confusion. It also prevents overselling.
Smart Settings and Full List of Features
International selling could seem very daunting at first. But fear not, Shopify Markets features Smart Setting where it will monitor your business’s performance and make automatic optimisations to help you sell more. It has a huge amount of sales data that it uses to make its data-centred decisions. But if you prefer to stay in control yourself, you can always turn this feature off within the dashboard. There are also a host of great features available on Shopify Markets and Markets Pro, as you can see from the above table!
Looking to get up and running with Shopify Markets? We can help! Our experienced teams can support you with using this platform as your business grows internationally. Contact us today to find out more.
