Ecommerce is becoming increasingly international. In recent years, over half of online retailers ship their products internationally, and the market for cross-border B2C online sales is expected to reach $7.9 trillion by 2030.
Creating localized experiences for these international shoppers is critical for brands that want to expand their reach.
Shopify offers two ways to set this up on your site: Shopify Markets and expansion stores.
Below, we’ll go over everything you should consider when deciding between Shopify Markets vs. expansion stores, and we’ll also show you how you can use Shogun to take localization to the next level.
For a while, expansion stores were the only way for Shopify merchants to offer different ecommerce experiences to different visitors depending on their location. Each expansion store functions as an independent entity, essentially separating both the frontend and the backend of your online store for each market that you serve.
Shopify Plus subscribers have the ability to create up to nine expansion stores at no additional cost (otherwise, creating expansion stores will require you to sign up for a new Shopify plan for each store).
Then, in 2021, the Shopify Markets feature was introduced.
Rather than running independent online stores for each geographic area, you can use this tool to offer localized shopping experiences with multiple variants of the same store. So, you can control multiple frontend views from the same backend — this centralization is quite convenient for maintaining your international presence.
You can customize your catalog for each market, allowing you to include certain products in some markets while excluding them from others. You can also edit the currency, pricing, shipping policies, and many other aspects of each market as well.
The benefits of using Shopify Markets are the following:
If you only have two or three total markets that you plan to expand into, Shopify Markets could be a good choice.
Currently, the Basic Shopify plan will let you have up to three markets, and that plan can cost as little as $29 per month.
So, let’s say you only need the Shopify features that are included in the Basic plan. In that case, setting up three markets would still cost you only $29 per month. On the other hand, setting up three expansion stores would triple that figure, adding up to a total cost of $87 per month.
Even if you have more than just a few localized experiences that you want to set up, the amount of customization you’re planning for each one may be minimal.
For example, maybe you need the feature set of the Advanced plan and you just want to make a few tweaks for each of the nine different regions that you serve.
With the Shopify Markets method, you could do this by using the three free markets that come with the Advanced plan ($299 per month) and then adding six extra markets ($59 each) for a total cost of $653 per month.
But with the expansion stores method, you would need to pay full price for nine Advanced plans in this scenario — that’s $2,691 per month. Another option would be to take advantage of the nine free expansion stores that come with Shopify Plus, but that plan alone will cost you at least $2,900 per month.
Shopify Markets makes it exceptionally easy to manage multiple versions of your site.
Maybe your ecommerce business has a relatively lean team. For lean teams such as these, time is your most valuable resource, and there’s only so much to go around.
The ability to keep track of all your markets in a single control panel will save you a lot of time, allowing you to quickly address your localization needs and then focus more on everything else involved in getting your business off the ground.
Managing expansion stores can be somewhat more tedious, as you need to make changes and track performance for each store separately. For some tasks, such as adding new product listings or installing apps, there may be duplication involved that you wouldn’t have to deal with if you were using Shopify Markets instead.
Shopify users in the continental United States have access to Managed Markets, which expands the localization capabilities of Shopify Markets.
With Managed Markets, Global-e will automatically be set up as your merchant of record. A merchant of record is the legal entity responsible for selling products to end customers — they manage logistics and ensure legal compliance in each area you sell to.
In other words, Managed Markets saves you from the trouble of dealing with registering for and remitting taxes, accepting local payment methods, utilizing local order fulfillment services, and many of the other complex tasks involved in selling across international borders.
While Shopify Markets allow for merchants to quickly roll out a few markets with minimal hassle, it doesn’t allow fit every use case merchants are looking for when they want to expand internationally.
For merchants that have more complex uses cases–that’s where expansion stores still might be helpful.
Here are the main benefits that expansion stores have:
While some merchants only plan to make small tweaks to each of their localized experiences, others may want to essentially build an entirely new store for each geographic area.
Expansion stores make much more sense for this use case.
For one, you’ll need to stick to the same Shopify theme for all of your store variants if you’re using Shopify Markets. If you would prefer to use one theme for some of your localized experiences and another for others, you’ll need to use expansion stores.
Merchants who need particularly deep customization may even custom-code features and design elements for each of their localized experiences. Depending on what exactly you’re trying to do, this might only be possible with expansion stores.
We mentioned above that with Managed Markets, Shopify takes care of finding a merchant of record for you.
The tradeoff is the processing fee that comes with each sale. While there’s no cost for the initial setup, every sale made through Managed Markets comes with a 9% fee.
That math works out for smaller stores, but larger ecommerce businesses would likely be better off finding their own merchant of record and handling the extra costs associated with cross-border commerce.
It all comes down to how much revenue brands are making every month from international sales.
The CEO of Ridge.com Sean Frank posted a great summary on Linkedin of what brands should consider as they expand internationally. Sean found that as a general rule, once stores start making more than $500,000 per month in international sales, choosing your own merchant of record starts to become a more cost-effective method than using Shopify Markets.
Large ecommerce brands with an international presence may already have staff located in each of the areas they serve.
In that case, expansion stores offer a cleaner solution than Shopify Markets.
With Shopify Markets, each team would need to log into the same control panel to access their storefront. Dealing with permissions could get messy, and there’s always a chance that someone will make an edit to the wrong storefront on accident.
But with expansion stores, you could set it up so that each team is only able to log into the store that is dedicated to their area, completely eliminating the risk for these types of user errors.
You may have noticed an overall theme here. The bottom line is that the Shopify Markets feature makes a lot of sense for smaller ecommerce businesses with basic localization needs, while larger brands with more complex needs should consider using expansion stores.
With Shogun’s Personalization tool, you can show different versions of the same page to different segments of your audience. In this case, a segment could be a users location (city, country, region, etc.).
In addition to location, Shogun provides brands with a variety of options for setting the conditions of these audience segments. You can build segments based on the URL that referred the visitor to your site, UTM tags, Klaviyo customer data, the day of week, the time of day — and, of course, the visitor’s location.
To give you a better idea of what you can do with localized ecommerce personalization, let’s take a look at some specific examples:
To provide the most accurate translations (and, therefore, the best user experience for your visitors), you will likely want to manually translate and adapt the content into each language that a significant share of your customers speak. This allows not only for accurate translations, but also adaptations that go beyond basic translations that will resonate with shoppers from the local market.
This can be done using Shogun Personalization and setting up segments by shopper location.
Steps for translating and adapting content to local regions using Shogun:
In addition to translation, there are many other ways to personalize your Shopify store for different locations.
One of the biggest challenges in ecommerce is convincing a visitor to make their first purchase. It helps to form some sort of connection with the people who visit your store — demonstrating that you understand their specific needs and preferences will help these visitors feel more comfortable with going ahead and placing an order. This is a big reason why personalization tends to increase marketing ROI by 10% to 30% and increase overall revenue by 5% to 15%.
Something as simple as a visual indicator of where the visitor is located will make people feel like your site is speaking directly to them. For example, you could have an image of a skyline on your homepage that changes according to the closest metro area to the visitor’s location.
To set up in Shogun:
These are just two examples of the many different ways you can use personalization to improve user experience, increase your conversion rate, and generate more sales. With Shogun, the possibilities are endless.
