Shopify Markets: How to Sell Internationally from Your Shopify Store

Key Takeaways

• Shopify Markets lets you sell to multiple countries from one store, with localised currency, pricing, language, domains and duties managed from a single admin. Up to 50 markets per store.
• Two UK thresholds catch merchants out: VAT registration at £90,000 of taxable turnover across twelve rolling months, and the EU IOSS low-value threshold at €150 per consignment.
• Collecting duties at checkout is the single highest-impact change. A customer who pays £30 and then gets a £12 customs bill at the door usually refuses the parcel and never returns.
• Every product needs an HS code and country of origin. Without them Shopify estimates, and your customer can still be charged on delivery.
• Global-e requires a minimum of £50,000 a year in international sales to be considered. Below that you need an alternative, and there are good ones. We moved a client onto Swap Global for DDP pricing and their overseas sales rose 75%.
• Shopify Markets Pro is now called Managed Markets. It needs Basic or higher plus Shopify Payments, and in the UK it is open only to certain stores.
• Shopify generates prepaid return labels automatically only when both store and customer are in the US. International returns need a carrier integration or a returns app.

Quick Answer

To sell internationally on Shopify, open Settings then Markets and add the country or region you want to sell into. Configure currency, language, a domain or subfolder, shipping zones and duty collection for that market. Set HS codes and country of origin on every product so duties calculate accurately. For most merchants, one store with Shopify Markets handles cross-border selling cleanly, and subfolders such as yourstore.com/fr are the right default because domain authority stays consolidated and Shopify generates hreflang automatically. Start with one or two markets, measure for 60 to 90 days, then expand. If you need someone else to take on tax registration and compliance, Managed Markets and Global-e both do that, but Global-e has a £50,000 annual international sales minimum, so smaller merchants should look at duty apps such as Swap Global or Zonos instead.

Table of Contents

• Are You Ready to Expand?
• Choosing Your First Markets
• UK VAT, IOSS and Compliance
• One Store or Several?
• How Shopify Markets Works
• Currency and Localised Pricing
• Duties, Taxes and HS Codes
• Choosing a Cross-Border Solution
• Languages and Translation
• Domains, Hreflang and International SEO
• Local Payment Methods
• Shipping and Fulfilment
• International Returns
• Marketing Per Market
• Why Matters Perspective
• Frequently Asked Questions

Shopify Markets is a built-in suite of international selling tools that lets you manage multiple markets from a single store. Rather than running separate stores per country, or stacking apps for currency conversion and duties, it centralises the lot in one dashboard.

This guide covers the whole job: when you are ready, which markets to open, the UK compliance you cannot avoid, how to configure Markets properly, which cross-border solution suits your size, and the parts merchants usually discover too late, namely HS codes, hreflang and international returns.

Are You Ready to Expand?

International traffic showing up in analytics is tempting, but moving too early spreads a small team thin and rarely produces what it promised.

Two indicators say the timing is right. Your home market is mature or slowing, and unprompted international traffic and orders are appearing consistently in the sessions-by-location report in your Shopify admin. Unprompted matters, because traffic you paid for does not tell you a market wants your product.

The second check is resource, and it is the one people skip. Expansion is not translation. It pulls in finance for VAT registration, operations for shipping zones and customs, marketing for region-specific campaigns and support for new time zones. Launching three countries at once while under-resourcing all of them is the most reliable way to make every market worse, including your home one.

Choosing Your First Markets

Trying to sell everywhere is the classic early mistake. Use the sessions-by-location report to see where unprompted traffic already arrives, pair it with Google Trends for your category by country, and check who is already ranking there. Where demand exists, traffic converts and competition is beatable, you have a candidate.

For a UK brand the shortlist is usually some combination of the US, Germany, France, Canada and Australia. The US is the largest addressable market with a shared language. Germany is the biggest ecommerce market in continental Europe. France gives a second EUR entry point alongside it. Canada and Australia are English-speaking with reasonable logistics corridors.

Open two, measure for 60 to 90 days, then open the next two. Sequencing beats simultaneity almost every time.

UK VAT, IOSS and Compliance

This is the part that does not appear until the first orders ship, and it is the most common gap in international guides written for a UK audience.

Two thresholds matter:

• UK VAT registration at £90,000 of taxable turnover across twelve rolling months. This dictates when you must register with HMRC, charge VAT on UK sales and file under Making Tax Digital.
• The EU IOSS low-value threshold at €150 per consignment. Below it, Import One Stop Shop lets your EU customers pay a simple VAT charge at checkout. Above it, they face a customs process at delivery unless you have arranged otherwise.

Shopify Markets applies the correct VAT or sales tax at checkout based on the buyer's country and supports IOSS registration for EU low-value sales. For US-bound parcels the model flips, with sales tax added at checkout rather than included in the displayed price.

The practical order of work: set product origin and HS codes at product level, register for IOSS if you are shipping into the EU, and add your VAT registrations to Shopify's tax settings per market. For genuinely complex multi-jurisdiction setups a tax automation tool integrates with Shopify, but most merchants do not need one.

One Store or Several?

There are two architectures, and a third option that has changed the answer.

Single store with Shopify Markets uses one store and renders the right experience per region. One catalogue, one admin, one team. Currency, language, domain, theme customisations and shipping zones all flex per market. It supports up to 50 markets and generates hreflang automatically. The benefit is operational: one analytics view, one theme, one app stack.

Multi-store means a separate Shopify store per region, each with its own admin, theme, products and checkout. Shopify Plus includes expansion stores for this. The trade-off is duplication. Every product update, content launch and theme change happens once per store, and keeping inventory in sync usually needs a third-party platform.

Submarkets, which Shopify shipped during 2026, are the middle ground and the reason multi-store is now rarely the right answer. A parent market acts as a template, for example Europe with EUR and English, and submarkets inside it inherit those settings while overriding what they need. A France submarket takes French language, a .fr domain and French homepage copy. For a UK brand selling across the EU, one EU parent with France, Germany, Spain and Netherlands submarkets is almost always cleaner than four separate top-level markets.

Multi-store earns its keep only when two things are both true: you sell genuinely different assortments per region, and you need to look like a different brand in each. If either is false, Markets wins on operating cost.

How Shopify Markets Works

Under Settings, then Markets, you define each market and configure currency, language, pricing, duties and tax, domain strategy and product availability. Shopify then detects a visitor's location and presents the appropriate experience.

Product availability is more useful than it first appears. Excluding products from specific markets handles regional ranges, shipping restrictions and regulatory limits without you managing it manually per order.

Currency and Localised Pricing

Three values matter and merchants routinely confuse them. Presentment currency is what the buyer sees and pays in. Shop currency is your reference currency for reporting. Settlement currency is what Shopify pays into your bank. For a UK brand selling into the EU, the buyer pays EUR, you report in GBP and you are settled in GBP.

Automatic conversion uses live rates and carries a conversion fee, so build that into your margins rather than assuming a clean exchange.

Manual per-market pricing is worth using when rate movement would make prices unpredictable, when you want deliberate market positioning rather than a mechanical conversion, or when you want prices that read properly. €87.43 does not look like a considered price. €89.99 does. You can also apply percentage uplifts per market to absorb shipping or operational cost.

Duties, Taxes and HS Codes

Duties are the single biggest cause of refused cross-border parcels. A customer in Paris buys a bag from a UK store, the parcel ships, a €6.40 customs bill arrives at the door, and they either refuse delivery or leave a one-star review.

Collecting duties at checkout fixes this. Shopify calculates them from the product's HS code and destination country, adds them as a line at checkout, and the buyer sees the full landed cost before paying. This delivered duty paid approach is the highest-impact single setting in international selling.

One thing to check in your own admin. Plan requirements for duty collection have changed and are reported inconsistently across sources, with some stating it is limited to Advanced and Plus. Look under Settings, then Markets, then your market's duties settings. If the option is not there, your plan does not currently include it, and the apps in the next section become the route instead.

HS codes are the part everyone skips. Every product needs a Harmonized System code and a country of origin, set in the product editor. Without them Shopify falls back to estimates and your customer can still be charged on delivery, which defeats the entire point. Setting HS codes properly across your catalogue is the highest-leverage hour of work in the whole international setup, because every fulfilment afterwards runs cleanly through customs.

Choosing a Cross-Border Solution

This is where most guidance stops being useful, because it presents Shopify Markets and Global-e as the only two options and then recommends Global-e to anyone with meaningful volume. There is a threshold nobody mentions.

The Threshold Nobody Publishes

Global-e requires a minimum of £50,000 a year in international sales for a merchant to be considered. We found this out the way most merchants will, by taking a client through the evaluation and being told they did not qualify.

That client still had the original problem. Overseas customers were abandoning at checkout or refusing parcels because of unexpected customs charges, and the fully managed option was closed to them.

What we did instead. We implemented Swap Global to provide DDP pricing, so international customers saw the full landed cost at checkout exactly as they would under a managed solution. Their overseas sales increased by 75%.

The lesson is not that Swap is the answer for everyone. It is that the gap between standard Markets and a fully managed merchant-of-record service is real, a lot of merchants sit in it, and it is fillable with an app rather than a platform change.

The Alternatives Worth Knowing

Swap Global handles DDP pricing so international customers see the landed cost at checkout. A good general-purpose choice when you want the customer experience of a managed solution without the volume requirement.

Zonos Duty and Tax is the better option when a merchant already has a preferred courier they want to keep working with, since it is less prescriptive about carriers.

Both leave you as merchant of record, so you keep the tax registration and compliance work. That is the trade-off. You get the checkout experience without the compliance offload, at a fraction of the cost and with no volume floor.

Managed Markets, Formerly Markets Pro

Shopify Markets Pro was renamed Managed Markets. If a source still calls it Markets Pro, it predates the change and is worth checking on other details too.

Under Managed Markets, Global-e becomes your merchant of record, which matters more than the feature list. Global-e is the legal entity selling to your customer, registering for and remitting tax, guaranteeing quoted duties, handling commercial invoices and arranging carriers, for a per-order fee. Orders, payouts, shipping labels, returns and tax documents still route through Shopify Support rather than Global-e.

Three things UK merchants need to know:

• Availability is limited. Managed Markets is open to businesses in the continental United States and to certain stores in Canada and the UK. Check eligibility before planning around it.
• The plan requirement is lower than usually reported. It needs Basic or higher, an online store and Shopify Payments. It is not Plus-only, despite that claim appearing widely.
• There are UK VAT consequences. Because Global-e is merchant of record, a UK Managed Markets order is treated as a B2B sale from your store to Global-e, who then sells to the customer. VAT applies, and the merchant of record service fee is charged to you directly. Speak to your accountant before switching it on, not after the first quarter.

On fees, published figures vary because the schedule changed. Merchants on the current schedule report roughly 3.25% to 3.5% per transaction plus a currency conversion fee, while those on the pre-October 2025 schedule may still see 6.5% and 2.5%. Check what applies to you rather than trusting any published figure, including this one.

Languages and Translation

Markets supports multiple languages per store, covering product content, navigation, checkout and notification emails. Shopify's Translate and Adapt app provides free AI translations you can review and edit, with an adapt function for markets that share a language but differ culturally, which is what UK and US English actually need. Third-party apps such as Weglot add scheduling, visual editing and translation memory for large catalogues.

Two rules worth following. Have a native speaker review before publishing, because machine translation reads wrong in ways that cost sales. And do not enable languages you do not need. A France market with an indexed Spanish version wastes crawl budget on URLs French customers will never click and Spanish customers will never reach.

Localisation also goes past language. Imagery, sizing guides, service hours, returns policies and seasonal references all shift. A homepage built around Black Friday and Thanksgiving reads oddly in Germany in the same week.

Domains, Hreflang and International SEO

Getting Hreflang Right

Hreflang tells search engines which version of a page suits which language and region. Shopify Markets generates these automatically, which removes the most error-prone part of international SEO.

With one important caveat: the automatic generation only works properly when your translated content is published and linked in navigation. Unpublished translations or half-configured markets produce incomplete annotations, and you will not notice until the traffic does not arrive.

If you ever implement hreflang manually, or use apps or custom theme code that might interfere, the rules that break implementations most often are:

• Annotations must be bidirectional. If page A references page B, page B must reference page A. Missing return tags make Google ignore the set entirely.
• Every page needs a self-referencing tag, plus an x-default for when no specific match exists.
• Each version must canonicalise to itself, not to a master version. A German page canonicalising to the English one tells Google it is duplicate content, directly contradicting the hreflang.
• Formatting is strict. Lowercase language code, uppercase country code, hyphen between. en-GB works, EN-gb does not.
• No broken or redirecting targets. A hreflang pointing at a 404 wastes crawl budget and may void the annotation.

Keyword Research Beyond Translation

Translating your keyword list and assuming the job is done is the most common international SEO failure. A UK shopper searches "trainers" and a US shopper searches "sneakers" for the same product. Set your research tools to the target country, look at what local competitors rank for rather than translations of your own terms, and check Google Trends for regional and seasonal differences.

Do not use automatic IP-based redirects to force visitors into a market version. It blocks crawlers from reaching other versions and prevents indexing. Markets suggests rather than forces, which is the correct behaviour. See our Shopify SEO guide for the wider picture.

Local Payment Methods

Payment preference varies sharply by country. Germany leans on Klarna and direct bank transfer. The Netherlands uses iDEAL. Offering only cards and PayPal in those markets loses sales to competitors who do not.

Markets with Shopify Payments surfaces relevant local methods automatically once a market is enabled. A workable rule: if a payment method serves more than roughly a third of consumers in a target market, enable it. Checkout is the choke point everything else feeds into.

Shipping and Fulfilment

Shipping zones, rates and carrier integrations are configured per market. Royal Mail, DPD, FedEx, DHL and UPS all integrate with Shopify Shipping with live rates at checkout.

The lever most merchants underuse is per-market fulfilment. A UK business can route US orders to a US-based 3PL while UK orders ship from home, all from one store. Customers get faster delivery, you carry less cross-border duty exposure, and stock sits closer to demand.

If you are evaluating a fulfilment partner, the fees to interrogate are set-up, order processing including the per-additional-item charge, minimum monthly fees, return handling and storage. Minimums are the one that catches smaller merchants, because you pay for order volume you do not have. Ask directly, the same way you should ask about the Global-e threshold.

International Returns

The part almost every international guide omits, and the one that quietly costs the most.

Shopify generates prepaid return labels automatically only when both the store and the customer are in the United States. Every other international return needs either a carrier integration or a dedicated returns app. If you are a UK merchant shipping to the EU and your returns process assumes Shopify handles labels, it does not.

Returns cost is also a barrier to the sale itself. Research from DHL found that a third of global shoppers will not buy from another country because of returns costs, which makes your international returns policy an acquisition issue rather than an operations one.

Two compliance points for UK brands:

• The Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give UK customers 14 days from delivery to cancel, a further 14 days to return, and require a refund within 14 days including the standard outbound shipping charge. If you never tell customers about the cancellation right, it extends for a full year beyond normal expiry.
• EU Directive 2023/2673 applies from 19 June 2026 and requires a straightforward electronic route for customers to exercise the 14-day right of withdrawal. In practice that means a working self-serve cancellation and returns flow rather than an email address.

Shopify supports market-specific return policies, so a UK and a French customer can see different windows and fees from the same store. Configure them per market rather than applying one global rule.

Marketing Per Market

An international strategy cannot be one campaign translated five ways. Buying habits, peak season calendars, dominant platforms and trust signals all shift. Singles' Day matters in parts of Asia. Black Friday lands differently in continental Europe than in the US. Segment by region in analytics and target locally rather than running one global campaign.

The compounding lever is content. Each market needs keyword research in the local language with local intent, published on the right subfolder. Most brands translate the UK blog and assume that is the work. Local content for local search intent is what actually builds organic reach.

Why Matters Perspective

The merchants we see expand successfully start with one or two markets, get duties and currency right, watch conversion per market, and expand on evidence. Opening twenty countries at once produces operational overwhelm and marketing spread so thin none of it works.

The more useful thing we can tell you is what happens when the recommended answer is closed to you. Most guidance points merchants at Global-e once volume justifies it, and does not mention that Global-e requires a minimum of £50,000 a year in international sales to be considered. We took a client through that evaluation, they did not qualify, and they still had customers refusing parcels over surprise customs charges.

We put Swap Global in place for DDP pricing instead, so those customers saw the landed cost at checkout. Overseas sales rose 75%. No platform change, no volume requirement, no merchant-of-record restructure. For a merchant with a preferred courier they want to keep, Zonos Duty and Tax does a similar job with less prescription about carriers.

That gap between standard Markets and a fully managed service is where a lot of UK merchants actually sit, and it is fillable. If you are being told you are too small for the managed option, you are not too small to collect duties properly.

If you are considering international expansion, email us. We can help identify which markets are the strongest opportunity, configure Markets properly, choose a duty solution that matches your volume, and set up international SEO. We offer a 3-month guarantee on development projects.

If you are expanding abroad, our Shopify developers can set up Shopify Markets and international selling for your store.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Shopify Markets free?

The core features are included on all plans at no extra cost: multi-currency, market configuration, subfolders, hreflang and duty estimation. International transactions carry payment processing and currency conversion fees, and Managed Markets adds a per-order fee on top.

What is the minimum to use Global-e?

Global-e requires a minimum of £50,000 a year in international sales to be considered. Below that you will not qualify, which is why merchants in that position should look at duty and tax apps such as Swap Global or Zonos to get DDP pricing without a managed service.

How do I show customers the full price including duties?

Enable duty collection at checkout in your market settings, and make sure every product has an HS code and country of origin so the calculation is accurate. If your plan does not include duty collection, a duty app such as Swap Global or Zonos does the same job. We moved one client onto Swap Global for exactly this reason and their overseas sales rose 75%.

What happened to Shopify Markets Pro?

It was renamed Managed Markets. Global-e still acts as merchant of record. It needs Basic or higher and Shopify Payments, and it is available to businesses in the continental United States and certain stores in Canada and the UK. Any source still calling it Markets Pro is out of date.

Do I need to register for VAT to sell internationally from the UK?

UK VAT registration is required at £90,000 of taxable turnover across twelve rolling months. Separately, if you sell into the EU, the IOSS low-value threshold is €150 per consignment, and registering for IOSS lets EU customers pay VAT simply at checkout rather than facing a customs process on delivery.

Should I use subfolders, subdomains or country domains?

Subfolders for most merchants, because authority stays consolidated on one domain and Shopify generates hreflang automatically. Country domains give the strongest geo signal but require building authority from scratch per domain. Subdomains are generally weakest, since Google may treat them as separate sites.

Does Shopify handle international returns?

Only partly. Shopify generates prepaid return labels automatically when both store and customer are in the US. Every other international return needs a carrier integration or a returns app. Shopify does support market-specific return policies, so configure windows and fees per market rather than globally.

How many markets can I have on one Shopify store?

Up to 50, and submarkets count towards that total. For a UK brand selling across Europe, one parent market with country submarkets is usually cleaner than several top-level markets.

Final Thoughts

Shopify Markets has made international selling genuinely accessible. Managing currencies, languages, duties, domains and payment methods from one store removes the complexity that used to demand multiple storefronts or a stack of conflicting apps.

The parts that still catch people out are not the configuration. They are the VAT and IOSS thresholds nobody mentions until the first orders ship, the HS codes that quietly break duty calculation, the hreflang that only generates properly when translations are actually published, and the returns process that does not work the way you assume outside the US.

And if the fully managed route is closed to you on volume, that is not the end of the conversation. Collecting duties properly at checkout is available to merchants of any size through an app, and it is the change that moves international conversion more than anything else on this page.

Start with one or two markets, get the landed cost right, and expand on evidence. If you want help scoping that, email us.

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