eCommerce enabled businesses to take their products online, helping them reach wider markets. But when it came to entering new markets, selling internationally has been something that only bigger brands were able to achieve. But now it’s no longer a privilege reserved for a few.
With Shopify introducing Shopify Markets, anyone with an online business will now be able to sell in global markets. Let’s tell you all about this new opportunity!
What is Shopify Markets?
Shopify Markets is a new global commerce solution that helps you easily sell to everyone who has access to the internet, all from a single storefront.
Simply put, Shopify Markets is here to help you scale and optimize your international selling strategy. You will be able to easily create your identity and manage international markets with ease from your Shopify admin.
This will take out the need for you to have dedicated teams to manage your global operations as you enter new markets, making selling internationally an opportunity that can be easily tapped into to scale your business.
Why should your online business use Shopify Markets?
1. Reach new markets and customers in a few clicks
Selling in international markets typically required brands to set up separate storefronts for their audience. This resulted in them having to manage separate websites and inventory for the orders being placed. Shopify Markets will streamline the efforts and bring it all onto one dashboard.
2. Increase sales with custom buying experiences for each market
With localisations like language, currency, duties and various payment methods easily available, businesses will be able to offer a more custom buying experience to shoppers from newer markets.
3. Scale faster with automated settings
Leverage powerful data-driven settings that help you automatically improve conversions and create better customer experiences across different markets, or take control of it all to manage experiences on your own.
Features of Shopify Markets
While there are said to be many other features being built into Shopify Markets, here’s what we know so far:
1. Currencies
Online shoppers want to be able to shop in their local currency, not wanting to go through the hassle of calculating conversions. Shopify’s data shows that localising currency helped online stores increase their conversion rates up to 40%.
With Shopify Markets, you will be able to automatically convert your storefront prices to 130+ international currencies with Shopify Payments. You will also be able to round the prices up based on the latest foreign exchange rates.
2. Languages
As per surveys, 65% of consumers prefer consuming content in their own language when making purchases online. It makes it easier for them to understand the product or service they’re buying, helping them make an informed purchase.
Shopify Markets will make it simpler and faster for you to translate your store using plug and play translation apps. Similar to currencies, this feature will help you deliver a consistent, localised experience across your store, helping you address buyer concern and increase conversions dramatically.
3. SEO-friendly domains
No matter which market you enter, 60% of online buying journeys will still start from the search engines. That’s where the importance of a robust international domain strategy comes into play.
International domains are proven to help increase the visibility of a store on the search engines for international buyers. This helps attract new customers - and the right ones for a market, helping you drive more sales from the storefront.
Shopify Markets will make setting region-specific domain strategy easy by automatically creating subfolders when you create a new market for your business.
For example, if you sell in Canada with a domain like shop.com, your Indian market domain will look like shop.com/en-in. The structure of your international domains will also be in your hands and can be set from the Shopify admin.
Shopify will also automatically set the right SEO tags so that international buyers see the right domain in the search results.
4. Payment methods
The payment modes you offer can make or break your sale. This is why it is important to tailor the payment methods you offer as per the audience you’re addressing in the international market.
For example, if you’re selling in North America, you will need to offer payment modes like credit cards and digital wallets like Shop Pay, Apple Pay and PayPal. On the flip side, European markets prefer to make bank transfers for payments.
Shopify Markets will make it easy to add major payment methods to your checkout with ease. This will further enhance the shopping experience you offer to buyers.
5. Duty and import taxes
Make it easier for international shoppers to understand the overall cart value by keeping additional duties, taxes and other fees that apply to the purchase, clear.
Shopify Markets essentially makes it easy for international customers to engage with your brand by collecting duty and import taxes at the checkout stage. This gives more cost clarity to buyers, reducing surprise charges at the payment or delivery stages.
6. Configurable market areas
With Shopify Markets you will be able to organize your international business and manage multiple markets with ease. You will be able to manage countries or regions by grouping them instead of having to individually manage them, which helps you execute your market strategies more efficiently without having to do repetitive work.
For example, you can create a group (market) to manage all of the United States, and one for Europe. You will be able to run the localisations as mentioned above at scale for each store.
7. International pricing controls
The same pricing strategy may not work in all markets. With Shopify Markets, you get a better control of your pricing strategy from a single store by setting up custom product prices per market. You can make quick percentage-based adjustments to manage the profits you earn on the sales you make in different regions.
8. Market-specific inventory and fulfilment controls
If you have placed your stock in warehouses in different locations for international sales, Shopify Markets will help you sync the right inventory to the online store that can ship to that specific location. This gives you better visibility on inventory and manage order fulfilment in a more efficient manner.
9. Smart automations and settings
Market changes are inevitable and managing multiple international markets can be overwhelming. Shopify Markets offers smart settings that use data and insights from nearly one billion international Shopify orders to help you enter new markets faster with strategies customized to suit those consumers.
When enabled, smart settings will essentially monitor how your business is performing in your activated markets. It will then automatically make changes and optimizations to drive better results in terms of sales.
While these are some of the features that Shopify announced for Shopify Markets, there are many others in the pipeline that are yet to be developed. These include market-specific content, market-specific product catalogs and payouts.
We’ll be sure to keep you posted and update this article when more details of the new features are released.
Shopify Announces Major Expansion of Markets Feature in Summer Editions '24
In order to augment the capabilities of merchants, Shopify has made it known in its Summer Editions ’24 release that it is making serious changes to its Markets feature.
The reimagined Markets now serve as a central command center, allowing merchants to customize buyer experiences across various channels and markets. This consolidation aims to streamline operations and simplify the expansion process for businesses of all sizes.
Here are some of the major components included in the new Markets feature:
- International Selling: The functionality enables traders to plan and cater to the needs of different markets with ease by making all currency conversion, language, and content management, and even site hosting.
- B2B Expansion: Tools suited for the needs of business buyers have been incorporated into the updated Markets to further expand their scope, enabling merchants to customize the wholesale processes towards the clientele.
- In-Person Selling Integration: Distinct and effective management of their physical stores and all the online activities via Shopify POS.
- Unified Admin Experience: There is no longer a need to hop from one store to the other or jump from one workflow to the next thinking that every step taken will help access expansion tools and settings as they are all in one place, under one interface, in the Shopify admin.
- Eased Launch Procedures: Plans have gone through an expansion narrowing this growth strategy into three broad stages; market entry, localization, and deployment.
This consolidation marks a significant shift from Shopify's previous approach, where various growth-related functions were spread across different parts of the platform. The new Markets feature aims to reduce complexity and save time for merchants looking to scale their businesses.
A Shopify spokesperson commented, "We've listened to our merchants and recognized the need for a more integrated approach to expansion. The new Markets feature reflects our commitment to providing tools that grow with our users' businesses."
The update is perceived to be of particular value to small and medium enterprises that in the past shied away from expansion because of the various complexities involved. With the centralization of these functions, Shopify intends to reduce the entry barrier to these independent merchants seeking new territory or sales outlets.
However, analysts consider it a strategic move as it will increase customer traffic to the website besides enabling the company to compete favorably with other e-commerce websites. This will be particularly an advantage over other platforms that deal with omnicommerce and global-level utilization of their resources.
In a step to make the announcement more believable, the officials revealed that the feature would undergo testing by select sellers beforehand, unlike the full implementation which is to take place in months on end from now.
As it is with any major platform upgrade, Shopify reminds merchants to take stock of all their current setups and make the necessary adjustments in anticipation of the commuting period that will optimize the use of the features once they are made available.
This announcement comes as part of Shopify's ongoing efforts to provide merchants with robust, scalable solutions that adapt to the ever-changing landscape of global commerce. The company continues to emphasize its commitment to empowering entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes to thrive in both local and international markets.
Don’t wait to go global. Start selling internationally with Shopify Markets!
Shopify Markets is giving you an opportunity to grow your online business to new heights. Experiment with different target markets, learn more about consumers and expand your business. It’s no longer a thing reserved for the big names in the industry!
But Shopify Markets is yet to be rolled out for everyone. If you’re interested, you will have to apply for early access here.
And if you’d like to learn more about Shopify or Shopify Markets, you can reach out to our Shopify experts here.
