Originally published on news.shopify.com
Global ecommerce had a record year in 2020: sales grew 25.7% to $4.2 trillion*. Increasingly, those sales are happening cross-border. By 2022, it’s estimated that upwards of one in four US buyers will have purchased from a merchant in a foreign country.** Ecommerce is a global industry with global opportunity.
Shopify already powers cross-border commerce for our merchants with solutions like international domains and multicurrency, empowering merchants to generate $20 billion in cross-border sales in 2020 alone. But we know that the appetite for international commerce is only growing: in July 2021, over 27% of all traffic to Shopify stores came from international buyers.
For merchants, selling outside of their home country can still be daunting. Complexities like currency conversion, language localization, providing local payment methods, and duty and import taxes can all act as barriers to effectively selling internationally, especially if you don’t know where to start. We're solving that and making Shopify global by default. Enter Shopify Markets: a centralized hub with all the tools needed for merchants to manage global commerce.
To make it easier for merchants of any size to take advantage of the global opportunity, we’re centralizing and enhancing Shopify’s cross-border capabilities. Now, merchants can use Shopify Markets to identify, set-up, launch, and optimize international markets—all from a single Shopify store.
"We believe the future of retail is retail everywhere. And with Shopify Markets, we're making it even easier for merchants—no matter size or budget—to turn their global aspirations into a reality" said Harley Finkelstein, President, Shopify.
With Shopify Markets, merchants can:
Enter new markets easily: With just a few clicks, merchants can enable new markets and open their business to more global customers. Merchants can then manage these markets from a central dashboard for a unified view of their entire business.
Increase buyer trust and conversion with tailored experiences for each market: We’ve seen that the conversion rates for storefronts with localized languages and currencies is up to 1.13x and 1.40x higher, respectively. To help merchants deliver meaningful experiences to their customers across regions, Shopify Markets will help merchants easily customize:
- Local currencies and payment methods
- Pricing and price rounding rules per market
- Product availability per market
- Local languages
- Local domains with automatic SEO optimization
- Automatically show the right currency / language based on buyer country
- Duties and import taxes on behalf of the buyer to eliminate surprise costs at product delivery (merchants can now account for these fees at checkout)
Optimize cross-border operations with actionable insights and smart settings: Insights surfaced by Shopify will help merchants determine where, when, and how to most effectively sell in a new region based on aggregate data from Shopify’s more than 1.7 million merchants globally.
Smart settings let merchants automatically optimize for the best results, without needing a dedicated global operations team. For example, merchants won’t need to keep track of what local payment methods are most popular in each market. Shopify knows what converts best, and will automatically surface the best payment methods at checkout.
Save time with a central global management platform: Merchants can seamlessly create localized storefronts from one store, which means they can manage all cross-border commerce in a single place in the Shopify admin with tailored consumer experiences in each market—whether that market is a country, like the Netherlands, or a region, like all of Europe.
Merchants will have a unified view of their entire business and monitor how their business is performing in activated markets—both domestic and international—thanks to Shopify’s centralized commerce platform.
“As one of the first size-inclusive retailers for designer style, 11 Honoré is increasingly seeing greater interest from women across the world for our products,” said Patrick Herning, Founder and CEO of 11 Honore.
“We are excited to meet this demand as Shopify simplifies the often complex elements of cross-border commerce, like language translation, local duties and taxes, and payment. This allows us to focus on what we do best: building a sustainable, inclusive fashion brand for women everywhere.”
Visit shopify.com/markets to learn more.
