If you are already a Shopify user, you may have seen the news: the arrival of Shopify Markets in your Shopify back office.
If you are not yet a Shopify customer, then stay too, you will discover that doing international e-commerce has finally become easy for everyone, regardless of the size of your business and your merchant site.
Why sell internationally?
So already, before seeing what Shopify markets offers, it is good to remember why international sales in e-commerce are interesting and what are its problems. Inevitably, this article is a summary but if the subject interests you, we can write a complete article on international e-commerce.
In short, in E-commerce, the catchment area no longer exists, so it is possible to sell anywhere in the world regardless of the address of your store.
If you read us, and according to our analytics stats, there is a good chance that you are located in France, Canada or Morocco, these are the 3 countries that bring us the most traffic.
But your online store can be based anywhere and sell in almost any country.
Unfortunately, there are still significant barriers such as language, SEO, local advertising, shipping, taxes, etc.
And this is where Shopify markets comes into its own: facilitating international deployment to increase productivity and visibility.
This will save you from opening a Shopify store for each country, for example. Even if basically this solution remains interesting in certain cases.
What is Shopify Market?
Shopify Markets is the name of the solution found by Shopify to help you boost your online store and sell internationally.
Your favorite e-commerce software has indeed detected that cross-border sales, outside borders, remain complicated for many merchants. This limits turnover and store growth. So we had to act!
Shopify markets will therefore help you increase your sales outside your country of origin.
How much does Shopify Markets cost?
Good news, like all Shopify developments, Shopify markets is included in your Shopify plan, regardless of the formula! Whether you're on the $29, $79, or $299 plan or even on Shopify Plus , you get Shopify Markets at no extra cost.
It is therefore accessible to all e-commerce stores using the Shopify cms, small or large without distinction. Important clarification: Shopify's commission remains the same regardless of the number of countries in which you sell.
How to benefit from Shopify Markets?
Again, thanks to Shopify 's modular and scalable architecture, you don't have to do anything special to benefit from Shopify Markets, if you see it in your interface (in settings) it's good! all that remains is to configure it to take full advantage of it.
If you don't see it yet, your store hasn't benefited from the update yet. Don't worry, this shouldn't take long.
Shopify has just over two million stores so far, so it doesn't update everything all at once.
How to configure Shopify Markets?
By default, you only have one configured market, that of your store. France in our example because it is a “French” test site.
But let's imagine that I want to sell my products in Spain to expand my commercial area and find new customers.
I will be able to add a market, Spain and configure the Spanish version of my site. In this case I will choose a new .es domain name, a language (Castilian Spanish), customs fees or potential taxes to obtain a site “in Spanish”. But I will also be able to create a Catalan Spanish version for my Spanish site in order to reach an even larger and more targeted audience.
A Barcelona resident will indeed appreciate being able to order on an e-commerce site in his own language.
Another example: for Belgium, you will finally be able to have a .be with French and Dutch on the same site, all in a single Shopify package and without multiplying your stocks, your descriptions or your translations!
The strength of Shopify Markets is indeed to manage to make languages and sites kinds of different “views” of your catalog.
The German of your German site can be used on your Swiss site and your Austrian site, or not! You choose. But you don't have this site / sub site / language problem like on most other E-commerce cms.
This is a problem that often prevents us from really being agile because multiple translations slow down the deployment of new products and new markets enormously.
Shopify market desynchronizes all the elements to make them sort of LEGO bricks that you can assemble as you wish.
For example, it is “easy” to create a Hindi version of its UK site to reach Indians living in London, for example. The French of your FR site can be reused on your Canadian site, see US if you want to reach the French of the United States.
Another strong point, a site can be dedicated to a zone (example: EMEA, Africa, South America) and not to a single country for example.
How is the translation going?
For the translation, you will necessarily need an application, even free, to manage the languages.
Be careful, some Shopify translation applications like Weglot use their own system and should therefore be forgotten if you want to take advantage of Shopify Markets!
An application like Etranslate is based on the functionalities of Shopify and will allow you two things:
In the free version, to be able to translate all the content of your site yourself into the language of your choice.
Attention, each Shopify site (per site include each url in …myshopify.com ) remains limited to 5 languages in addition to the base language.
In paid version to be able to load translations by CSV file or to be able to call upon an artificial intelligence to “automatically” translate your site.
A kind of boosted Google translation that will still require, in our opinion, some proofreading and careful attention to the meaning of sentences and words.
But good for quickly testing a market, it can sometimes be enough
Selling internationally remains an adventure
So let's be frank. Shopify markets will help you expand internationally, but it's still an adventure that will require energy, capital and time.
So it's up to you to have the shoulders strong enough to be able to manage all that. You will indeed have to redo your entire customer acquisition pipe, all your marketing campaigns, detect the new top sellers for each country, understand the different consumption habits, needs, expectations and "good ways of doing things".
But at least, on the tech side, you won't have any barriers and that corresponds 100% to Shopify's philosophy: to offer you the best tools and manage the techniques to lower the barriers to e-commerce and make everyone benefit from the best tools for sale online.
Should you use Shopify Markets?
So even if it's a free feature included in your package, using Shopify markets will require a little time, international packages and of course marketing time to redo campaigns.
That is to say investments. If you are looking for pure and immediate profitability, this may not be the priority.
If you are looking for new sources of turnover, diversification of sources of income, then expanding internationally can be a very good idea!
At Pikka for example, even if our site is on Shopify, going international means: managing a project in English (we know how to do that) but also redoing all the documentation and the project methodology in English. And that requires an investment.
Shopify Markets is therefore an essential brick for anyone who wants to conquer the world from their warehouse! No doubt that the functionalities will even continue to be enriched over the months to make it a real asset compared to other solutions on the market.
If you want to test Shopify markets, even if you are not on Shopify, you can make an appointment with our sales team to organize a demo.
