Introduction
If you are a Shopify store owner, you would have heard about Shopify Markets. Shopify Markets constitute a new feature for the platform that allows Shopify sellers to sell their products in the Shopify store of other retailers. But what exactly are Shopify Markets, and what do they mean for Shopify users?
Shopify has now made it astonishingly easy for small and medium businesses to cater to newer markets globally. But how true is that, and does it tackle the challenges of local customer preferences? Let’s take a look!
What is ‘Shopify Markets’?
Shopify Markets is a new initiative by Shopify to help put small and medium businesses on the global map.
With this feature, businesses can now focus on expanding their store to new markets without worrying too much about the Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy and process.
With easy-to-use and intuitive dashboards, Shopify Markets makes your Shopify website’s storefront ready for international customers. It aims to improve customer experience by resolving the difficulties faced by customers of Shopify Plus Accounts!
How can Shopify Markets Benefit Your E-Commerce Business?
One of the major challenges that small and medium e-commerce business owners face is complying with the demands of a market that they have little to no idea about.
Shopify Markets simplifies the entire process starting from dynamically adjusting storefronts based on the country of the customers, adjusting shipping prices, and more!
In essence, Shopify Markets helps small and medium business owners deliver market-specific experiences effortlessly – something that was previously only possible with a large budget by larger companies!
Let’s dive into the features of Shopify Markets to further understand how it benefits your Shopify store.
Shopify Plus vs. Shopify Markets – Features and Benefits
Shopify Markets offers several extremely useful features to Shopify storeowners that empower them to cater to newer markets far and wide.
1. Currency Conversion and Pricing Configuration
Both Shopify Plus and Shopify Markets have a common multi-currency functionality that can display the local currency to the user based on their IP address and also transact in the concerned currency.
Shopify Plus only lets you display currencies and does not allow for a separate price list for particular markets which is, generally, useful for global retailers.
However, Shopify Markets improves on this and provides an additional advantage over Shopify Plus: i.e. it lets you configure pricing lists for new markets. For instance, you may need to offer lower prices and take lower margins to attract customers in new markets whereas, in your primary markets, you can maximize your user margins.
Thus, Shopify Markets gives you complete control over the currency, pricing lists, and dynamic offers for the target clientele thereby allowing flexibility in your approach for newer markets.
2. Dynamic Storefronts with Language Translation
Did you know that 4 out of 10 website visitors refuse to transact if the language is not the most familiar to them?
While Shopify Plus allows for storefronts in multiple languages so customers can land on the translated version of your store, it is not dynamic, in the sense that if there is no translated version that exists, the storefront is displayed in the primary language.
This means that you will need to manually edit pages for particular audiences from new markets.
On the other hand, Shopify Markets offer Auto-detection of customer location and automatic storefront display in the local language. This ensures that Shopify store owners do not manually edit their product pages for international audiences.
With Shopify Markets, your Shopify storefront will be automatically translated and adjusted to match the local preferences of the customers – no extra effort required!
Shopify does this by offering a Multi-Language API that can be integrated with any third-party translation tool such as Google Translate and also allows merchant vendors to import the translation’s CSV from the admin. Shopify App Store offers 5 native translation apps such as Langify, Translation Lab, Polyglot Translate, Translate My Store and Langshop some of which offer freemium plans and are available in 130+ languages.
Shopify also inserts meta and hreflang tags automatically to assist search engines to recognize various languages and indexing localized store pages, therefore, letting these stores tap into newer markets.
3. International Shipping
Shopify Plus and Markets provide you with the ability to set international shipping rules for different markets. This makes it easy for Shopify store owners to offer competitive shipping rates without investing in separate shipping software or services.
It lets you customize shipping preferences based on the destination, product type, and weight of the item.
Furthermore, and unlike Shopify Plus, Shopify Markets provides discounted rates with USPS, UPS, DHL Express, and Canada Post for merchants in the United States and Canada, so you’re already prepared to evaluate their pricing. Shopify Markets also offers multiple order and bulk order shipping as well as label printing.
4. International Domains
One of the major hurdles with expanding to newer markets is to build your search engine authority all over again for local intents in search queries!
Shopify Markets gives you a hand with that as well thanks to international domains.
International domains help your Shopify store stay laser-focused on one specific country by signaling search engines of a local presence while the Shopify Markets dashboard helps you manage everything from the comfort of your place.
For example, “yourdomain.com” is too generic. However, “yourdomain.in”, “yourdomain.ca” and “yourdomain.uk” are more localized to the market and can improve your store’s visibility on search engines locally.
5. Calculating Duties and Taxes
If Shopify’s Shopify Tax and Shopify Duty features do not suffice, Shopify Markets also enables you to calculate customs duties and taxes for the new market.
This ensures that Shopify store owners can set prices without worrying about additional costs.
Further, customers can clearly see how much their products cost and what they are paying for without unforeseen expenses, thus adding to customer satisfaction.
6. Multi-Store Dashboard
Merchants need to factor in different nations’ customers and their buying habits and lifestyles. Having a distinct Shopify shop for each nation is an excellent method to ensure that your website and offerings are tailored to each target market.
With Shopify Plus, you can open multiple storefronts for the same and different regions whereas, with Shopify Markets, you will be able to unify and integrate them in a single dashboard for easy management.
This hyper-personalization feature lets retailers gain complete control over the region’s UX and UI and operational & financial features.
Market-Specific Content
Content strategy is another crucial aspect of expanding to new markets.
Without a proper content creation and distribution process in place, it isn’t easy to get notices. However, the downside to this is an exponential increase in costs for small and medium business owners.
Shopify Markets will soon launch a feature that enables online shop owners to deliver content localized to the market at relatively minute added costs.
How to Get Started with Shopify Markets?
Shopify Markets is not currently available to all Shopify store owners.
For you to be eligible for Shopify Markets, your Shopify store must fulfill the following requirements:
- You must have a Shopify Plus account
- Your Shopify store must be live and in good standing
- You must have an active Shopify Merchant account
- You must be selling in at least one other Shopify market
If you meet all the requirements, registering for Shopify Markets is easy.
Navigate to the Shopify Markets page and click on the “Login to apply for early access” to request your access to the feature.
Conclusion
Shopify Markets is Shopify’s initiative to help Shopify store owners build their presence in newer markets without the extra effort.
The Shopify Marketplaces is a game-changing feature for Shopify stores and Shopify stores can benefit immensely by leveraging it.
Now that Shopify Marketplaces has come into existence, online shop owners no longer have to face the hassle and high costs associated with expanding to new markets.
They can do so with Shopify’s help, which takes care of translating storefronts, calculating duties and taxes, and delivering localized content at a fraction of the cost.
