Shopify Markets: currencies, domains, duties and Translate & Adapt

Shopify Markets is the part of the Shopify admin where you decide who your customer groups are and what each group sees. A market can be a country or region, a group of B2B company locations, a set of retail locations or a sales channel. Per market you set the currency, a catalog with product availability and prices, a domain or subfolder, the languages, and how duties and taxes appear at checkout. On the Advanced and Plus plans you can also vary theme content and checkout per market.

Translate & Adapt is Shopify's free app for the language side. According to its Shopify App Store listing, it translates up to two languages automatically and lets you add as many manual translations as you want, and it can adapt wording between markets that share a language. Markets decides where content goes. It does not write that content, fill your customs data or keep translations in sync with your catalog. Those jobs land on your product data, and this guide covers them alongside the settings.

Four kinds of market: regional, B2B, retail and channel

Shopify used to treat a market as a list of countries. The current version of Markets defines a market by the conditions that put a buyer into it. The help center lists these types:

• Regional markets: one or more countries or regions, for example "Germany" or "EU without Germany". This is the type most stores mean when they say Shopify Markets.
• B2B markets: company locations or groups of B2B customers, with their own catalogs and pricing.
• Retail markets: groups of Shopify POS locations that offer different products or prices.
• Channel markets: one or more sales channels, so a marketplace or social channel can get its own catalog, prices and currency. Shopify announced these in June 2026.
• Submarkets: a market inside another market. A "France" submarket under "Europe" inherits the Europe settings and overrides only what differs.

Inheritance is the part people underestimate. A submarket takes its parent's currency, catalog, domain and theme settings until you change them. That saves setup time, but it also means a price change on the parent reaches every child that has not overridden it.

Per-market settings and the plan each one needs

Creating regional markets is free on every Shopify plan. The requirements page lists which customizations depend on the plan, as of mid-September 2026:

Two requirements apply regardless of plan. To charge customers in more than one currency you need Shopify Payments or Adyen; with any other processor, every market pays in your default currency. And a market can only be activated for countries that have shipping rates, because only customers in an active market can check out.

Catalogs: percentage adjustments, fixed prices and exclusions

Each market gets a currency, and a catalog decides which products that market can buy and at what price. Without a catalog, every product is available everywhere at your default price, converted into the market's currency. With one, you have three levers:

1. Price adjustment: a percentage up or down for every product in the catalog, for example +8% for the UK to cover shipping and duties. By default it also moves compare-at prices.
2. Fixed prices: a set price for a specific product. A fixed price overrides the percentage, so a product priced at £24.00 stays £24.00 whatever the adjustment says.
3. Product inclusion: products left out of a market's catalog disappear from that market's listings and search results, and a direct visit to the product URL shows your 404 page.

Catalogs can be exported and imported as CSV files, but the export contains only products with fixed prices; products priced by percentage alone are left out. That matters if you plan to keep per-market prices in a spreadsheet or another system. Also note that fixed-amount discounts are set in your default currency and converted at checkout, so a "€5 off" code shows as an odd number in pounds.

When submarkets and parent markets both have catalogs of the same type, Shopify combines them and uses the more specific price. If neither is more specific, the lower price wins. Check the "View as" option on the Products page before launch; it shows each product's price and availability as a given market sees it.

International domains: top-level domains, subdomains or subfolders

Each market can get its own URL, and that URL decides which currency and language a visitor lands in. Shopify's international domains guide lists three formats, plus the option to keep one URL for everything:

Three details trip up stores that already sold in more than one language. Language-only subfolders like /fr can only exist on the primary market; secondary markets need a language plus country code, like /fr-be. International domains need a custom domain, not your myshopify.com address. And when you delete a market that used a subfolder, its URLs return 404 until you import redirects.

To check the hreflang tags on your market URLs, or to write them for a storefront outside Shopify, use the hreflang generator. Our multilingual SEO playbook covers URL choice, keyword research per language and hreflang step by step.

Duties and import taxes: what Shopify needs from your products

For markets outside your own customs area, Shopify can estimate duties and import taxes and charge them at checkout, so the customer is not asked to pay on the doorstep. You switch it on per market in Settings > Taxes and duties or from the market itself, and choose whether duties show as a line item or are included in your price.

The setup requirements are mostly about data and shipping:

• HS codes on your products. The Harmonized System code classifies the product for customs. Shopify flags products that miss one during setup. Our HS code guide explains the structure and how to pick the right heading.
• Country or region of origin. Origin decides which tariffs and trade agreements apply. Shopify flags products that miss an origin during setup, and its duties considerations warn that incorrect HS codes can lead to additional duties charged on delivery.
• DDP shipping labels. If the customer paid duties at checkout, the parcel must ship Delivered Duty Paid, or they pay twice. Not every carrier supports DDP for every destination.
• Specific shipping zones. Duties cannot be collected in the "Rest of world" zone; the country needs its own or a shared named zone.
• No Shopify Fulfillment Network. That fulfillment app does not support duty collection at checkout.

Shopify charges a transaction fee on every order where it calculates duties, even when the amount is zero: 0.85% when Shopify Payments is the primary gateway and 1.5% otherwise, with a temporary rate of 0.5% for all merchants that the help center listed as in effect since February 2025. No fee applies to domestic orders or to orders shipped between EU member states, where duties are not calculated at all.

Translate & Adapt: what the free app covers and where it stops

Shopify installs Translate & Adapt automatically when you add a second language. It has a side-by-side editor for manual translations, automatic translation for a limited number of languages, and an adapt mode for markets that share a language. The limits that matter for a catalog, from the app requirements and listing:

• Automatic translation for up to 2 languages on top of your default language. Any further language is translated by hand, through CSV import, or by a third-party app that writes through Shopify's Translations API.
• Manual edits are kept. Running automatic translation again fills untranslated content and refreshes outdated machine translations, but does not overwrite translations you added or edited by hand.
• Content it cannot translate: collection filters, product images, tags, Shopify Forms, manual payment method instructions, and third-party app content that is not stored as a Shopify translatable resource.
• URL handles: /products/shoes can become /products/zapatos, but the word "products" stays. Handles are per language, not per market.
• Unsupported languages include Bengali, Frisian, Latin and Tagalog, among others.
• Uninstalling keeps the translations. They stay in the store until you delete them in the app or remove them through a CSV import.

The two-language limit is the one that decides your approach. A Dutch store that adds German, French and English already needs three, so at least one language is translated outside the automatic feature.

Adapting copy for markets that speak the same language

Adapt mode is for markets that share a language but not a vocabulary or spelling. Shopify's own example is "Sweaters" for the US and "Jumpers" for the UK. Other cases where it earns its keep:

• Dutch in the Netherlands and Belgium: "fiets" works in both, but Belgian shoppers search "GSM" where Dutch shoppers search "mobiele telefoon", and Belgian product copy may need different delivery and warranty wording.
• German in Germany, Austria and Switzerland: Swiss German spelling uses "ss" instead of "ß", and prices are in CHF.
• French in France and Belgium: different terms for some product categories and legal notices.

Content can only be adapted in languages that have been added to that market. Theme content per market (banners, announcement bars, blocks) needs per-market theme customization, which requires the Advanced plan or higher; on other plans every market shares the same theme setup. File metafields appear in the translation editor too, so a size chart or care leaflet in PDF can get a version per language.

Eight product fields each Shopify market needs before launch

Most Markets tutorials stop at the settings screen. In practice the launch date depends on whether the catalog is ready. Before you activate a market, check every product it will sell for these fields: Our ecommerce localization guide covers units, sizes and search terms per market, and Shopify variant limits explains how to plan option structures for products near the variant cap.

Multiply that out and the size of the job becomes clear: 1,200 products with 8 translatable fields each is 9,600 field values per language, before options and metafields.

Worked example: a Dutch bedding store adds Germany, Belgium and the UK

Take a Shopify store based in the Netherlands, selling 1,200 bedding and textile products in euros with Dutch as its default language. It wants to sell in Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom. Here is how the setup and the data work divide:

1. Markets: Netherlands as primary market. A Europe market with Germany and Belgium as submarkets, both in euros. A separate UK market in pounds.
2. URLs: subfolders on the main domain: /de-de for Germany, /nl-be and /fr-be for Belgium, /en-gb for the UK. Dutch stays at the root because it is the primary market.
3. Languages: German, French and English. That is three languages, one more than automatic translation covers, so at least one of them is translated outside the app: by hand, through a CSV import or by a translation tool that writes through the Translations API.
4. Adaptation: Belgian Dutch gets adapted copy for delivery promises and a few product terms; the Dutch default text stays as is.
5. Catalogs: the UK catalog gets a +8% adjustment, with fixed pound prices on the 50 best sellers so they end in .00 or .95. Products with an EU-only certification are excluded from the UK catalog.
6. Duties: only the UK needs duty collection, since Germany and Belgium are inside the EU. A cotton duvet cover goes under HS heading 6302 (bed linen) with "Portugal" as country of origin. Products without both fields block an accurate estimate.
7. Content check: a German product page is opened in the /de-de folder with "View as Germany" to confirm title, options, alt text and price, then the same for /fr-be and /en-gb.

The settings in steps 1, 2 and 5 take an afternoon. Steps 3, 4, 6 and 7 are the weeks of work, and they are all product data. For the wider market-entry decisions such as VAT, payment methods and returns, see our international ecommerce guide.

Six Shopify Markets setups that cost margin or rankings

1. Activating a market before the catalog is translated. Shopify falls back to the default language for missing fields, so the German page shows a German menu around a Dutch description. Shoppers notice; search engines index it.
2. Leaving every price on automatic conversion. Converted prices like €21.37 look like errors. Use fixed prices for top sellers and a rounding rule for the rest.
3. Skipping HS codes because the setup lets you continue. The estimate is then wrong or missing, and your UK customer gets a bill from the carrier.
4. Deleting or renaming a market without redirects. Every URL in its subfolder becomes a 404 overnight.
5. Editing translations in two places. If a PIM or CSV workflow pushes translations and someone also edits them in Translate & Adapt, the next push decides which version survives. Pick one place where translations are edited.
6. Planning per-market banners on Basic or Grow. Per-market theme customization needs Advanced or higher; below that, every market shows the same theme content.

Pushing AI-translated titles and descriptions to Shopify locales

Shopify Markets handles market rules, currency and checkout well. What it leaves to you is producing complete, correct product content in every language and keeping it in step with the source. That is where a PIM fits. In WISEPIM, AI translates the product record into each target language with per-field rules and a translation dictionary for terms like brand names and materials; AI translation is 95%+ accurate, and someone can still check the output before it is exported.

You map each WISEPIM language to a Shopify locale, and export registers the translated title and description for each one, so the language versions in your markets come from one record instead of being edited inside the store. It writes title and description only; SEO fields, handles and alt text still go through Translate & Adapt or a CSV import. The Shopify translation guide shows the setup.