Shopify Markets

What does Shopify Markets do today?

A market is a group of buyers defined by conditions. The original condition was geography: a country or a group of countries. Shopify has since added three more kinds of market: B2B markets built from company locations, retail markets built from point of sale locations, and channel markets for the sales channels you sell through.

Each market can override the store defaults for:

• Currency, with automatic exchange rates and rounding.
• Catalogues, which set which products are available and at what price.
• Online store, meaning theme customisations, domains, subfolders and languages.
• Duties and taxes, including tax-inclusive pricing and duty collection at checkout.
• Business entities, on Shopify Plus only.

Markets is included on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. Showing prices in local currencies and accepting local payment methods both require Shopify Payments.

How do parent markets and inheritance work?

Markets now form a hierarchy. A market whose countries are a subset of another market's becomes its child, and a child inherits every setting it does not override. A "Canada and US" market can hold shared pricing rules, while a "Canada" market below it changes only the currency and the French language.

When one buyer matches several markets, the most specific wins, in this order: company location, retail location, region, store default. A B2B buyer in Toronto sees their company's catalogue, not the Canadian consumer prices.

This is the part most worth planning on paper. A flat list of twenty single-country markets is easy to create and hard to maintain. A few parent markets with small overrides below them keep pricing changes to one edit.

Subfolders, subdomains or country domains: which is best for SEO?

Each market that needs its own language or content needs its own URL. Shopify offers three options, available on Basic and above:

• Subfolders such as example.com/en-ca share authority with the primary domain. For most stores entering a new market, this is the safe default.
• Subdomains such as ca.example.com are treated as separate sites by some search engines.
• Country domains such as example.fr give the strongest local signal, but each needs its own registration and builds authority from zero.

Language-only subfolders such as /fr can exist only on the primary market. Shopify generates hreflang tags automatically from your market and language settings, and they are on by default. Automatic redirection sends shoppers to their market's version but excludes known search engine crawlers, which is how every version gets indexed.

The URL structure is the decision that is expensive to reverse. Changing it later means a full redirect map and a period of lost rankings.

How do duties and import taxes work?

Shopify can estimate duties and import taxes at checkout so customers are not handed a customs bill on delivery and refuse the parcel. The pricing page lists "Estimate and collect duties and taxes" on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. Transaction fees apply to every checkout that calculates duties, including test orders.

The calculation depends on correct HS codes on your products. There are gaps: duties cannot be collected for the Rest of world shipping zone or for some destinations, including Northern Ireland and Puerto Rico; Shopify Fulfillment Network does not support it; and Shopify shipping labels do not support DDP.

Rules also change. From 1 July 2026 the EU replaced its €150 duty-free threshold with a flat €3 duty per tariff line on qualifying orders, and Shopify includes that charge in the duty shown at checkout.

What do catalogues and B2B markets add?

A catalogue is a set of products with optional custom pricing, assigned to a market. It is how one store shows a different range in the UK, a different price list to trade buyers, and a smaller range in one retail location.

B2B runs on the same system. Basic, Grow and Advanced allow up to 3 active catalogues across all B2B markets, and those plans must be on the new Shopify Markets to use B2B catalogues. Shopify Plus allows unlimited B2B market catalogues and assigning catalogues directly to specific companies. Contextual B2B storefronts and checkout need Advanced or Plus, and customising catalogues for retail markets needs Shopify POS Pro or Plus.

When is Managed Markets worth it?

Managed Markets, called Markets Pro until June 2024, puts Global-e in as merchant of record. Global-e handles tax registration in destination countries, collects duties and taxes at checkout, remits them, and offers DDP shipping with DHL Express, DHL eCommerce, FedEx and UPS. Duty amounts shown at checkout are guaranteed, and US orders get protection against fraud chargebacks.

Eligibility is narrow. The store must be based in the continental United States, or be one of certain stores in Canada and the UK; its currency must be the default currency of that country; and it must use Shopify Payments. Global-e charges its own fees per order, so compare them with what registering and filing in each country would cost you.

For a Canadian brand outside the eligible group, the normal path is self-serve Markets with duties collected at checkout.

How do you add a new market without breaking anything?

1. Decide the URL structure first, and keep it consistent across markets.
2. Create the market under its parent so it inherits pricing and catalogue rules.
3. Set currency, rounding and any price adjustments, then check a sample of real product pages.
4. Publish translations and review them. Machine translation gets a market started but should be edited by a person.
5. Turn on local payment methods. Card-only checkout loses buyers in countries where wallets or bank transfers dominate.
6. Set shipping rates and duty collection, and place a test order to that country before announcing it.

What are the common mistakes with Shopify Markets?

Treating currency as localisation. Showing euros is not selling in Germany. Language, delivery times, returns and payment methods all differ.

Turning off automatic hreflang. Shopify warns this can hurt SEO. Do it only if you replace it with a complete reciprocal setup.

Geo-redirecting crawlers with a custom script. If search engines are redirected by location, they index one version of the store.

Running one store per country by habit. Markets replaces most of that duplication. Shopify Plus also includes up to 9 expansion stores for teams that still need separate stores. Consolidating several stores into one, with their order history and customer records intact, is a migration project rather than a settings change.

If you are planning international expansion on Shopify Plus or a headless build, our Shopify development team can map the market structure and URLs before launch.