Shopify's reach in eCommerce and Retail is now global. Even if its historical footprint in North America (Shopify is Canadian) remains significant, the platform's growth in Europe and Asia has been spectacular in recent years. By the end of 2025, Shopify had customers in 175 countries, distributed as follows: 44% in the United States, 31% in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, 16% in Asia-Pacific, Australia, and China, 5% in Canada, and 5% in Latin America.
Yet, Shopify took its time before integrating truly robust features to manage international sales! Let's be clear: it has been possible to sell in most countries with Shopify, since the platform's early days in 2006. But when we talk about going global, we're actually talking about the ability to sell in multiple countries from a single website, adapting and localizing the business as much as possible for each targeted country.
Just a few years ago, an international merchant using Shopify would systematically deploy multiple back offices in order to "isolate" the different countries and properly localize the shopping experience. And that's precisely why the Shopify Plus plan includes 10 back offices. For a bit of background, it started with 3 back-office integrations, then Shopify quickly expanded to 10 to meet localization needs.
Starting with the introduction of Markets in 2021, Shopify has radically changed its approach, finally offering an agile solution to support the internationalization of its merchants businesses. And the platform has continued to add options and features ever since.
This article aims to provide an overview of the main features of the Markets menu. Given that everything is always evolving very quickly at Shopify, and that the coming months will inevitably bring new possibilities to manage international sales...
A brief history of language management in Shopify
To grow an international business, you need to be able to publish your site in multiple languages. And until 2019, this simply wasn't possible directly within Shopify! You had to use Apps (the most popular at the time was Langify) that added an external layer to the websites, including the translated text. This wasn't native content in Shopify, the translated texts were stored on the servers of the third-party solution.
And it was (only) at the end of 2019 that Shopify finally opened its Translation API, meaning that the platform's native data model was now able to accommodate translations. But there was no menu to manage these translations, the use of an App remained mandatory.
These translation Apps will gradually evolve and integrate the Translation API, allowing merchants to have their data stored in Shopify and offer a smoother experience on their websites. An interesting side effect was that merchants could switch from one translation App to another as prices changed, since the data was now centralized in Shopify.
In August 2022, Shopify takes a major step forward by releasing its own Translate & Adapt App, which is automatically installed for all merchants who have configured more than one language in their back office. This App also offers automatic translation of 1 or 2 languages, in addition to manually entered translations.
To date, the remaining translation Apps do business on automatic translation beyond 2 languages, as well as the ability to offer sophisticated import/export features. But their use has obviously sharply declined... End of an era!
Markets beginnings in the back-office
It was in September 2021 that Shopify announced Markets and began rolling them out to all stores. A rollout that will extend over several months and will be finalized in early 2022.
The new Markets menu was located in the Settings menu.
The initial features available included languages, currencies, and domain names. For the Advanced and Plus plans, these were supplemented by price adjustments, content customization within the theme, and duties tax estimation. And with Shopify Payments, the ability to accept payments in multiple currencies was also possible.
Markets Pro service (now Managed Markets)
In September 2022, Shopify launched an additional offering in the United States, Markets Pro, developed in collaboration with Global-e. With Markets Pro, merchants can delegate to Global-e the management of markets on their websites, including sales processing, in exchange for a commission.
The service is directly integrated into the Shopify interface, merchants do not need to sign a contract with Global-e to benefit from it. However, a merchant using Markets Pro loses full control of the Markets menu in their back office, access is no longer available.
Markets Pro experienced a rather slow technical take-off. Shopify took a full year to roll it out on a large scale in the United States, and the offering was concretely available at the end of Summer 2023.
In June 2024, Shopify announced it was rebranding Markets Pro into Managed Markets, which is still the current name of the offering.
In March 2025, Shopify rolled out a major change: the ability for merchants to decide which markets they want to manage themselves and which ones they want to migrate to the Managed Markets offering, all within a single back office.
This flexibility also extended to Global-e direct customers, who can now share the Markets menu in the same way.
And finally, in recent months, Shopify has begun opening up its Managed Markets offering to merchants located in Canada and the United Kingdom.
The arrival of New Markets
Since the creation of the Markets menu, Shopify has kept adding new configuration possibilities.
Notably, in Spring 2023, Shopify added the management of product lists per market, thus offering merchants the possibility of allocating certain products for specific markets.
And then in June 2024, during the Summer '24 Edition, Shopify announced a very big update to come to the Markets functionalities, grouped under the term "new Markets".
The new features include:
- Moving the Markets menu to the first level in the Shopify back-office (and no longer in the Settings menu),
- The possibility of creating submarkets, inheriting all or part of the parameters of other markets,
- The possibility of creating markets with POS locations or for B2B business,
- A new graph view of the markets and their main parameters.
The roll out of the new markets will only begin a year later, from May 2025, and will spread over almost a year, with the last stores only being updated in Spring 2026.
It is, to date, the update that took the longest in the history of Shopify, sometimes making the task a little complicated for merchants and the ecosystem, who had to juggle between two versions without really knowing when the switch was going to take place on a specific back-office, and with some temporary incompatibilities with other functionalities...
But it also allows us to figure out the complexity and scope of the technical work carried out by the Shopify teams to enable the implementation of new markets.
Markets for POS and B2B
One of the major developments in new markets is the extension of the scope to physical retail (Shopify POS Pro) and B2B, in addition to the initial scope of online sales.
Combined with existing Markets features, this opens Shopify to many new use cases.
For physical store networks, Markets are now compatible on Shopify POS Pro with a mix of:
- High price stores and discount stores (outlets),
- Of owned stores and franchise stores.
For B2B, the integration with Markets happened naturally from the moment the Catalogues menu, previously a Products submenu specifically dedicated to managing assortments for B2B customers, was moved to the Markets menu, to also be used for B2C online sales and retail.
What can you do with Markets today?
Markets customization options in Shopify are, as of this Fall 2026, extremely vast, making this feature one of the cornerstones of the platform!
What you can manage for each Market:
- The list of countries to include,
- The languages to display,
- The currency to use (payment in the currency with Shopify Payments or Adyen),
- The list of products to sell,
- The prices to apply,
- The promotions to offer,
- The content of each page to display (with Advanced and Plus plans),
- The Checkout customization funnel (with Advanced and Plus plans),
- Taxes to calculate,
- Local payment methods to offer,
- Legal entity to use (with the Plus plan, and Shopify Payments or Adyen),
- Geolocation of relevant visitors,
- Business rules (returns, etc.) to apply,
- Domain name and URL format to configure,
- SEO to manage.
What is not yet possible with Markets today?
Even though Markets management settings are very comprehensive today, some limitations remain in certain cases. In fact, there will always be limitations, as international sales are inherently complex and constrained by local laws and their frequent changes!
The main current limitation concerns data confidentiality within an organization. Currently, it's not possible to grant access to the Shopify back-office only for the data of a specific Market. In the case of a merchant with subsidiaries, a situation where internal data sharing is often compartmentalized, each person in each subsidiary with a back-office access will be able to see the data of all the other subsidiaries.
There's no doubt that Shopify is working on this. Moreover, when introducing B2B sales staff profiles in early 2024 (which allow restricting the back-office access to a specific number of companies and orders linked to the sales staff), Shopify mentioned its intention to extend this logic to markets data. This evolution may therefore be imminent...
The other major limitation concerns Apps and/or private connectors, many of which are still not compatible with Markets. This is particularly common with solutions or providers based in North America, whose customer base is not very international and therefore does not use the feature. Be wary, for example, of an American logistics provider whose Shopify connector doesn't manage Markets, while the European merchant who wants to work with them has created a specific US Market in their back-office...
Finally, it's also worth mentioning that the functional scope of Markets is limited for merchants who choose not to use Shopify Payments (or Adyen) for payment processing. This isn't a deal-breaker, but it's important to keep in mind that Shopify Payments (or Adyen) offers significant additional flexibility, especially when payments are processed by different legal entities in different countries.
Roadmap of new Markets features
The Shopify platform is improving every month, and several Markets updates are certainly in the works.
It will be particularly useful to have a look at future Shopify Editions, with a new website being released every 6 months and presenting all the new features of the platform, including those related to Markets.
To discuss Shopify Markets features and their use cases, feel free to contact us.
