How to Set Up Shopify Markets: A Step-by-Step Guide

Key takeaways

• Markets is Shopify’s framework for selling internationally. One market groups countries that share a currency, catalog, domain, language, and tax treatment.
• Order matters. Create the market and assign regions first, then layer on domain structure, catalog, currency, language, and duties.
• Your domain choice is an SEO decision. Subfolders, subdomains, and country domains all work, and Shopify generates hreflang tags automatically for whichever you pick.
• Currency is only one piece. This guide keeps currency brief and links to the dedicated deep-dive on rounding and payment processing.
• Test every market before going live. Preview the storefront in each region to confirm the currency, language, and pricing customers will actually see.

This guide walks through how to set up Shopify Markets step by step: creating a market, assigning regions, choosing a domain structure, adding catalogs and price lists, adding languages, and collecting duties. It is the broad Markets setup. For the currency-specific detail, we point you to our dedicated guide at the right moment rather than repeating it here.

Why you can trust us

Jacques has over 15 years of development experience and has helped hundreds of Shopify brands build and localise their storefronts. We have been in the Shopify space for four years and built Fudge, an AI storefront editor used by hundreds of stores with a 5.0 rating on the Shopify App Store. We run multi-region storefronts ourselves, so the steps below reflect the actual admin flow rather than a generic checklist.

What is Shopify Markets?

Shopify Markets lets you manage how customers experience your store based on their location.¹ A market is a group of one or more countries or regions that share the same settings: currency, product catalog, domain and language, and tax treatment.

Instead of running separate stores per country, you run one store with multiple markets. Each market controls what a shopper in that region sees.

The customisations a market can carry are:

• The currency shown to customers
• The catalog that sets product availability and pricing
• The domain and language used for that region
• Tax-inclusive pricing and duty collection settings

Your primary market is the main country or region you sell to. Everything else builds out from there.

Step 1: Check the prerequisites

Two things decide how far you can take Markets before you start clicking.

Your Shopify plan. Markets is part of standard Shopify. Basic and higher can create markets and collect duties. Some advanced controls, such as B2B catalogs and certain per-market checkout settings, sit on higher tiers. Plans change, so check the live listing for current plans if a specific feature is gated for you.

Shopify Payments availability. Showing local currencies and letting customers check out in them relies on Shopify Payments supporting multiple currencies in your region. Confirm Shopify Payments is available and active in your country before you promise customers local-currency checkout. If it is not, you can still localise language and catalog, but currency conversion at checkout will be limited.

Have your target regions in mind before you begin. A common first grouping is a home market, an EU market, a UK market, and a rest-of-world backup.

Step 2: Create a market and assign regions

This is the core of the setup.

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Markets.
2. Click Create market.²
3. Enter a Name for the market. Use something you will recognise later, such as “Europe” or “United Kingdom”.
4. Set the publishing status to Active to show it immediately, or Draft to build and preview it first. Draft is the safer default while you configure the rest.
5. In the Includes section, click Add condition and choose Regions, then search for and select the countries this market covers.
6. Click Save.

You can add or remove countries later by opening the market, clicking the edit icon next to Includes, and adjusting the selection.

Group countries that genuinely share settings. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands can share a single EU market on the euro, but they do not share a language. We handle language inside the market in Step 6.

Shopify also uses a backup region to decide what customers who do not match any active market see. Make sure that fallback experience is sensible, because it catches every visitor from a country you have not explicitly grouped.

Step 3: Choose the domain and URL structure

Before you add products or languages, decide how each market appears in the URL. This is an SEO decision, not just a cosmetic one, so it is worth getting right early.

Shopify supports three structures:³

• Subfolders, like yourstore.com/fr/. Simple to set up with no extra domain cost. This suits most stores because all your SEO authority stays on one domain.
• Subdomains, like fr.yourstore.com. Useful when you want a visibly separate structure per market.
• Top-level country domains, like yourstore.fr. The strongest local signal, and the most work, because each domain is managed separately.

For most merchants, subfolders are the right default. They keep link authority consolidated and are the least to maintain.

Whichever you choose, Shopify generates hreflang tags automatically based on your market and language configuration.⁴ Those tags tell search engines which version of a page to show by region and language, which prevents your localised pages being treated as duplicates. You do not need to add hreflang by hand.

You set this under the market’s domains and languages customisation. If you are building localised campaign pages on top of these markets, our guide on how to localise Shopify landing pages covers keeping the page content in step with the market.

Step 4: Set the catalog and price list

A catalog is the set of products, with optional custom pricing, that you assign to a market.⁵ It controls two things: which products are available in that market, and at what price.

Create a catalog

1. From your admin, go to Settings > Markets and open Catalogs.
2. Click Create catalog and give it a name.
3. Choose the publishing status next to the name.

Set the pricing

In the Pricing section:

• Set the currency in the Set prices in field. The catalog currency and the market currency must match. You cannot map a Canadian market to a price list in US dollars.
• Optionally enter a percentage in the Price adjustment field to raise or lower every price in that market by a fixed percentage. A common use is adding a margin buffer for a region with higher shipping or duty costs.

Two ways to price per market:

• Percentage adjustment. Fast to apply across the whole catalog. Good when a blanket uplift or discount is acceptable.
• Fixed per-market prices. Set the exact price for each product in the market’s currency. More work, but it gives clean prices and precise margin control on your important SKUs.

If you only need custom pricing and not custom product availability, a pricing-only catalog is the simpler choice. Product availability then follows your sales channel publication, and the catalog just controls price through its price list.

Step 5: Set the currency per market

Each market has a currency. Your EU market runs in euros, your UK market in pounds, and so on. With Shopify Payments configured for multiple currencies, customers see and pay in that currency from the first page view.

This is where a full Markets setup meets currency work, and currency has enough depth to deserve its own guide. Rounding rules, auto-conversion versus fixed pricing, and payment processing per currency are all covered in detail in our Shopify multi-currency setup guide.

The short version for this setup:

• Set a clean currency per market, matching the catalog currency from Step 4.
• Use rounding rules so converted prices do not land on values like 46.73, which read as “not designed for me”.
• Set fixed prices on your hero SKUs and let long-tail products auto-convert with a margin buffer.

Configure the specifics using the currency guide, then come back here to finish the market.

Step 6: Add languages and translation

A market can serve its own language, which is where localisation goes beyond currency.

Add the language to your store

1. Go to Settings > Languages.
2. Click Add language and select the one you want.
3. Click Save.

Adding a language makes it available. It does not translate anything yet.

Translate with Translate & Adapt

Shopify’s free Translate & Adapt app handles the translation itself.⁶ It supports automatic translation, manual edits, and CSV import. It also lets you adapt content per market, so you can change product descriptions, promotional banners, or legal text for a specific region rather than only translating word for word.

Once the language is translated, assign it to the market under the domains and languages customisation and publish it.

Pair language to region deliberately. A euro market covering Germany, France, and Italy should not be served entirely in English just because the currency is shared. German for Germany and Austria, French for France, Italian for Italy. Serving every euro country in English is the most common half-measure we see.

For a deeper look at the translation options, including third-party apps, see the language section of the multi-currency setup guide.

Step 7: Set duties and import taxes

For cross-border markets, decide whether you collect duties and import taxes at checkout so customers are not surprised by a courier bill on delivery.

Collect duties at checkout

Duties and import taxes at checkout are now available on all Shopify plans.⁷

1. Go to Settings > Taxes and duties.
2. In the Duties and import taxes section, click Set up.
3. Select the countries and regions you ship to.
4. Confirm HS codes and country-of-origin information on your products.
5. Review the terms, then Agree and activate.

Once you collect duties at checkout, you must ship those orders with Delivered Duty Paid (DDP) labels rather than Delivered at Place (DAP), so the customer is not charged twice. Confirm your carrier supports DDP. US and Canadian merchants can buy DDP labels through DHL directly in the Shopify admin.

Managed Markets

If you want Shopify to handle more of the cross-border complexity, Managed Markets takes on local regulations, taxes, duties, international shipping, and localisation per market. It is powered by Global-e.⁸

Managed Markets is available to eligible US merchants on the Basic plan or higher with an online store.⁸ It also changes who acts as the merchant of record for those international orders. Availability and eligibility change, so check the live listing for current plans if you are considering it.

Step 8: Preview and test each market

Do not trust the settings screen. Test what a real shopper in each region will see.

Preview the storefront per market. Use the market preview or switch the market selector on your storefront and walk the full path: homepage, a product page, cart, and checkout.

For each market, confirm:

• Currency shows correctly from the homepage onward, not only at checkout.
• Language displays in the right language across pages, including navigation and buttons.
• Catalog shows the right products at the right prices, with no unexpected out-of-stock or hidden items.
• Domain resolves to the structure you chose, and the market selector switches regions cleanly.
• Duties and taxes appear as expected at checkout for cross-border markets.

Test on mobile too. Most Shopify traffic is mobile, and a market selector that works on desktop can be hard to reach on a phone.

If you are editing storefront content to match each market, the Fudge store editor can adjust page content across your theme so the localised experience stays consistent.

Step 9: Go live and monitor

When previews look right, activate the market. Open it under Settings > Markets, change the status from Draft to Active, and save.

Confirm shipping rates cover every country in the market before you activate. A market with no shipping rate for a country will block checkout there.

After launch, watch the numbers per market:

• Conversion rate by market. A market converting far below your home market usually points to a language, currency, or shipping gap.
• Checkout completion for cross-border markets, where duties and shipping cost surprises cause drop-off.
• Search visibility per region once hreflang and localised pages are indexed.

Roll out one or two markets first, confirm they perform, then expand. Launching ten markets at once makes problems hard to isolate.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Serving local currency but keeping English everywhere. Currency alone is a half-measure. Pair each market with the right language.
• Leaving prices on ugly converted values. Auto-conversion produces prices like 46.73. Add rounding rules and set fixed prices on hero SKUs.
• Forgetting shipping rates for a new market. Every country in a market needs a shipping rate, or checkout breaks for that region.
• Skipping the DDP label step. Collecting duties at checkout without shipping DDP double-charges the customer at delivery.
• Adding a language but not assigning it. Adding a language in Settings does not publish it to a market. You still have to assign and publish it.
• Launching every market at once. Test and roll out gradually so you can trace any drop in conversion to its cause.

For a wider strategic view of selling internationally on Shopify, see our Shopify Markets guide. For ideas on building the localised pages themselves, our Shopify landing page examples are a useful reference.

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