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Shopify Markets: Global expansion for your Ecommerce Brand

Published on October 18th, 2022 by Sahil Saini

Seamless expansion into international markets with native currencies, languages, domains, and duties using Shopify Markets.

Selling to an international audience is often fraught with complications. Before business owners can take their stores across borders, ecommerce businesses must first figure out various details such as payment methods, local languages, taxes and duties, FX rates, and SEO.  Similarly, because an eCommerce store that appeals to one region may not convert well in another, businesses must plan ahead of time for multiple domain names and store designs that appeal to each region.  Despite their potential profitability, all of these often necessitate a significant time and financial investment. The tasks remain challenging even with advanced Shopify or Shopify Plus. All of these tasks, however, are simplified by Shopify Markets.

Shopify Markets is a seamless and hassle-free way to expand a Shopify eCommerce business across geographical and economic boundaries. It is an all-in-one cross-border eCommerce solution for Shopify and Shopify Plus. Shopify Markets extends Shopify dashboard with the critical functionalities eCommerce business owners need to sell globally, allowing them to configure critical features and launch an international eCommerce storefront in no time.

In this post, we have critically curated a few crucial areas where Shopify Markets makes it simple and flexible to expand an eCommerce storefront across national boundaries.

Currencies & Payments

Customers are more likely to buy products if they're sold in their local currency. Products that are offered to customers in their native currency have a higher chance of being purchased.  By converting prices to the visitors' local currencies using Shopify Markets, businesses can serve customers more effectively.

Even after converting to their foreign exchange equivalents, pricing strategies may vary by region. Shopify Markets enables users to address this efficiently by manually setting prices for each country or adjusting prices. That is, a benchmark price can be set for the goods and then apply a rule that increases or decreases the price by a certain percentage depending on the customer's location.

Similarly, price rounding is an excellent tool that an eCommerce store can use to intelligently price their goods and drive sales. Due to FX rates, merely converting a price in local currencies to its USD equivalent is not enough to achieve concurrent price rounding. Regardless of the local currency, Shopify Markets streamlines this by enabling businesses to set an effective rounding rule. As a result, they can easily have the price of a good end with .99, .95, .90, or whatever they want.

Languages

The ability to translate website content into various regional or local languages is one of the biggest drawbacks of providing customer service across geographic boundaries. While English is a widely spoken language across the globe, many regions are better served in other official languages like Chinese, French, Dutch, and so on.

Even though many eCommerce websites already seek to fix the problem of translations by using 3rd party integrations and i18n (Internationalization) handling, Shopify Markets makes the process even more efficient.

Merchants using Shopify Markets won't have to be concerned about third-party integration problems like server outages or other issues. Language translation features are built into the Shopify Markets platforms, allowing customers to browse more smoothly and conveniently across storefronts in their local language.

Domains

Subdomain and subfolder are two popular methods for connecting various parts of a website to its parent website.

Subdomains and subfolders both make it easy to categorize website sections and personalize them based on the customer's location. Using the appropriate subdomain or subfolder is a great way to group such classifications, whether you want to design a custom page for users in a specific region or simply translate the content while maintaining the same web design.

Shopify Market allows businesses to create sub-domains or sub-folders with no hassle, thereby optimizing search engine crawling and driving international traffic to the storefront. Users can easily create sub-domains or sub-folders with Shopify Market, which improves search engine crawling and increases traffic to the storefront from around the world.

Taxes and duties

Shopify Plus allows Shopify merchants to charge taxes and duties using the delivered duty paid (DDP) or delivered at place (DAP) model. These methods are ineffective because the actual amount of the fees is frequently hidden from the customers and occasionally works against the interests of the merchants when customers refuse to pay.

Using Shopify Markets with Shopify Plus provides more clarity on duty and taxes by estimating and collecting them from international customers at checkout.

Payment Processors

Shopify Payments is typically recommended for use by Shopify Plus stores because it makes accepting payments in various currencies simple and flexible. Shopify Markets not only enables storefronts to accept payments in different currencies, but also permits customers from other countries to use their preferred local payment methods, which boosts the checkout conversion rate for international Shopify merchants.

Conclusion

By giving you the tools to build and manage storefronts that are appealing to customers from a variety of demographics, Shopify Markets enables you to scale and optimize Shopify stores. Since all the tools and features are incorporated into the same Shopify dashboard that the merchants are already accustomed to, they can manage the many international features and make changes to specifics without difficulty.

How can AKOS help?

At AKOS, we pride ourselves on building accessible, secure, and scalable Shopify storefronts. Our expertise in building and managing multilingual and cross-regional Shopify stores helps us launch global selling initiatives quickly and efficiently. We’re happy to schedule a consultation and help lead that charge for your brand. Just say Hello!

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