Selling Internationally With Shopify Markets: The 2026 Cross-Border Setup

Turning on a new country in Shopify Markets takes an afternoon. The six decisions underneath it decide whether those orders are profitable, and each one is cheaper to make before launch than to unwind after a quarter of cross-border volume. This is the sequence we walk clients through when they’re going cross-border on Shopify or Shopify Plus, in the order the decisions actually arrive.

Shopify Markets is the control layer for international ecommerce on the platform, and it does a lot of the mechanical work well. What it does not do is make any of the six calls below for you, and its defaults answer several of them badly.

Every number here links to a primary source: Shopify’s own documentation and pricing pages, the Federal Register, GOV.UK, and the European Commission’s taxation and customs service. Pages were checked in August 2026, and vendor pricing moves without notice, so confirm any fee in your own admin before you model against it. Where something comes from Shopify’s marketing rather than its documentation, it’s labeled that way.

Most operators still carry the mental model that a market is a country. Shopify’s developer documentation says a market is “a group of buyers that a merchant targets with a specific buying experience,” defined by conditions, and states plainly that markets are no longer defined by geography alone. The help documentation lists those conditions as location, customer group, retail location, or sales channel, plus a backup region that governs any customer who matches no active market.

That matters for setup order. If your markets are audience segments rather than map pins, then the catalog, currency, language, and theme content decisions all hang off conditions you define, and the backup region is the fallback experience you should test first rather than last.

Shopify documents four market types: country or region, retail, B2B, and channel. Country and region markets are available on every plan with no limit on how many you create, while B2B markets cap active catalogs at three across all B2B markets on Basic, Grow, and Advanced, and go unlimited on Shopify Plus. Retail markets are on all plans, though customizing their catalogs requires Shopify POS Pro or Plus.

Why can’t you find any of this in the help center? Because Shopify renamed things twice in one sentence. In a July 2, 2024 changelog post, Shopify said that starting June 24 the tool formerly known as Markets Pro would be renamed Managed Markets, and Shopify Markets would be renamed International in the Help Center. So an internal runbook still using the old name is describing a name retired two years ago, and the docs you want are filed under “International” even though the admin, the developer docs, and the Editions pages all still say Markets.

Two more signals that the product is mid-rebuild. Shopify’s changelog announced a newer version of Markets with submarkets on May 21, 2025, letting you carve a French submarket out of a Europe region market, and a redesigned Markets setup graph on June 17, 2026. Both /manual/markets/ and /manual/markets-new/ doc paths are live at the same time, so check the date on whatever page you land on.

This is the fork with the most money on it, and it isn’t really a fee decision. It’s a decision about who carries the legal obligation to sell into a country, and what you’re willing to pay to hand that obligation to someone else.

Every figure in this table is quoted from Shopify’s international pricing page as of August 2026. The page carries no last-updated date, which is itself a reason to verify against your admin.

Three things about that table need saying out loud. The 3.9% is not a rate you can plan against: Shopify qualifies it as varying by plan, buyer card type, and where the card was issued, and points you to the main pricing page for exact rates. Treat it as an illustration, not an input.

Second, the duties line contradicts itself. Shopify’s page lists the self-run duties add-on at 0.5% per transaction while stating in the same cell that the regular fee is 0.85% with Shopify Payments and 1.5% without, with no explanation of the relationship, no promotional label, and no end date. We aren’t going to pick one for you, because the published page carries both. Open your own admin and read the rate you’re actually charged.

Third, don’t add these percentages together. The incidence differs by line: the Managed Markets fee and the Shopify Payments processing fee come out of your payout, while the 1.5% conversion fee is multiplied into the price your buyer sees. Shopify’s exchange rate documentation publishes the formula and a worked example, converting $10.00 USD at 0.867519 and then multiplying by 1.015 to reach €8.81.

That split is the whole argument. Shopify’s own pricing FAQ claims that all Managed Markets fees, including product fees, taxes, and conversion, are built into the price international buyers see, and that unlike most international selling tools, Managed Markets doesn’t reduce domestic revenue with cross-border fees. That’s Shopify’s marketing framing on Shopify’s page, and the same page adds that managed international pricing raises international product prices to cover the fee, and that with fixed international pricing the way fees are applied may vary.

So the cost doesn’t vanish. It moves from your payout to your shelf price in the destination country, where you’re competing with local sellers who don’t carry it. The question to model isn’t “can I absorb 3.5%,” it’s “am I still competitive in Berlin or Manchester after the markup.”

Shopify isn’t the merchant of record. Global-e is, described in Shopify’s own docs as the legal entity responsible for selling to the customer and for complying with local laws in the destination country, handling duties, tax remittance, commercial invoices, and carrier arrangements. Operators routinely assume they’re contracting with Shopify for this. They’re using a Shopify product with a third party underneath it.

What transfers, per that page: tax filing registration in destination countries, duty and tax guarantees at checkout, fraud protection through Shopify Protect, which the requirements page limits to stores based in the United States, chargeback protection with rare exceptions, and compliance with product restrictions and local law. What still routes through you and Shopify Support rather than Global-e: orders, payouts, shipping labels, returns, and tax and customs documents.

Is Managed Markets a Shopify Plus feature? No. Shopify’s overview page states the store must be on the Basic plan or higher and have an online store, and the pricing page quotes a separate Plus rate, which only makes sense if non-Plus stores qualify. The requirements page sets harder gates than plan tier: your store must use Shopify Payments, your store currency must be the default currency of the country your business is based in, and your business must be located in the continental United States excluding territories, Canada, or the United Kingdom.

Those location rules have teeth. Canadian sellers need all fulfillment locations in the same province and must use Shopify Tax or Basic Tax. UK sellers need fulfillment locations entirely in Great Britain or entirely in Northern Ireland, not both. Each of the three requires at least one non-PO-box business location and at least one fulfillment location in that country, and for US businesses the fulfillment location has to be in the continental US.

UK and Canada eligibility is recent. Among the Shopify international expansion features listed on the Spring ’26 Editions page are new UK and Canada availability, FedEx support through FedEx International Connect Plus, and a duty calculation breakdown.

Counting the destination list on that same requirements page gives 188 countries and regions. Shopify publishes the list without a total, so count it rather than trusting a number you found elsewhere.

Rent it if you’re opening more than a handful of destinations and you don’t have cross-border tax counsel already engaged. Tax registration, filing, and remittance is the part of cross-border that scales worst, because each destination brings its own threshold, its own registration process, and its own filing cadence, and none of that work makes your product better. Paying a per-transaction fee to make that someone else’s problem is a good trade when the alternative is five registrations and an advisor’s retainer.

Run Shopify Markets yourself if you’re going deep into one or two destinations where you’ll be registered anyway. At that point renting it would mean paying the Managed Markets fee for tax infrastructure you already own, your price stays competitive against local sellers, and you keep direct control of carrier relationships and landed cost. Run it yourself, too, if you’re disqualified by the gates above, which quietly rules out a lot of stores before the fee conversation starts.

One operational sweetener sits on the rented side. Managed Markets locks the exchange rate for up to 30 days on international returns, while self-run Shopify Markets gets no stabilization or guarantee, which means a refund issued three weeks after the order can settle at a different rate than you charged. That gap is small per order and irritating at volume.

Shopify publishes the 30-day lock but doesn’t spell out who pays return shipping under Managed Markets or whether duties come back on a refund. Ask before you launch, and get the answer in writing.

Shopify’s terms are DDP and DAP. Under Delivered Duty Paid, you take on import costs like duties, import taxes, and brokerage or disbursement fees. Under Delivered at Place, you’re responsible for shipping only and the customer pays import costs on arrival. DAP is what older documentation calls DDU, an Incoterm that’s been retired.

DDP is the better buyer experience and almost every brand wants it. Then the carrier constraint arrives. Shopify supports DDP labels through its carrier accounts for a short list: Canada Post for US destinations only, DHL Express, DHL Express Canada, and DHL eCommerce. Use any other carrier through Shopify’s carrier accounts and you can’t purchase a label for an order where duties were collected.

You can switch duties collection on at checkout, take the money, and then find you have no way to buy the label inside Shopify for that order. The carrier decision is made for you the moment you choose DDP on self-run Shopify Markets, unless you’re buying labels outside Shopify’s accounts.

Two more things break here. Duties are calculated from declared value and shipping cost, product category by HS code, country of origin, destination tariff rates, and applicable trade treaties, and Shopify states that HS codes are required for all international orders, falling back to descriptions and categories when they’re missing. Managed Markets bundles unlimited HS code classification, which is a real reason to rent it if your catalog is large or genuinely hard to classify.

And brokerage fees aren’t covered. Shopify states that carriers might charge brokerage and disbursement fees, and that those aren’t included when duties and import taxes are collected at checkout. A buyer who paid a duty-inclusive price at checkout can still be asked for money at the door, which is the exact experience DDP was supposed to buy.

Shopify tells merchants setting up Managed Markets to update store policies so customers know duties and taxes are calculated at checkout and don’t need to be paid on delivery. Do that on self-run Shopify Markets too. Policy copy is a support-ticket deflector and a compliance surface at the same time.

By default every product in your store is available in every market at your store’s default prices, and a catalog is a set of products with optional custom pricing assigned to a market. Most brands need one catalog longer than they think. You need a second when a SKU is restricted in a destination, when country-specific pricing has to break away from a percentage adjustment, or when a product simply can’t be shipped there.

The stacking rules are where this gets expensive. Across markets of the same type, products from all applicable catalogs are available to the customer. Across different market types, the more specific market’s catalog overrides the parent’s, and Shopify’s developer docs describe catalogs as inherited from parent markets and added to child markets rather than replaced. Adding a catalog to a channel market doesn’t replace or exclude the country or region market’s products.

When two catalogs of equal specificity disagree on price, the lower price displays. No warning, no conflict flag, just the cheaper number in front of the buyer. Audit for overlap every time you add a catalog, because nothing in the admin will tell you it happened.

Local pricing has prerequisites. Shopify states that only stores using Shopify Payments with access to one-page checkout can use all functionality, covering both percentage adjustments and per-country product prices.

Rounding rules sit on top of a price that has already been converted and had the conversion fee applied, per Shopify’s conversion formula. Rounding needs Shopify Payments, the only control is round up to the nearest value, and Shopify states you can’t customize it beyond its per-currency defaults. Gift cards are excluded from rounding entirely.

Shopify supports all three structures, individually or combined: country top-level domains like example.fr, subdomains like fr.example.com, and subfolders like example.com/fr-fr. You need a custom domain on the Basic plan or higher, since a myshopify.com address won’t work, and Shopify Payments for multi-currency. Shopify’s stated trade-off is that subfolders inherit your primary domain’s authority, subdomains build authority more slowly, and separate top-level domains each build from zero.

Does Shopify generate hreflang tags for you? Yes. Shopify states that hreflang and meta tags are created automatically for every international domain or subfolder you set up. What it can’t do is fix the rules Google enforces around them: each version must list itself and every other version, pages that don’t point at each other get their tags ignored, and x-default covers browsers that match nothing. hreflang is a signal about which version exists, not a guarantee of which one gets served.

Now the part where Shopify’s product and Google’s guidance disagree. Shopify ships two automatic redirection settings. Country and region redirection detects a customer’s geolocation and sends them to the URL for their resolved market. Language redirection detects a customer’s browser language and switches the storefront to match.

Google’s multi-regional guidance, last updated December 10, 2025, says to avoid automatically redirecting users between language versions because it can stop users and search engines from seeing all versions, which lands squarely on that second setting, and separately says not to use IP analysis to adapt content because it’s unreliable and can break crawling.

Shopify’s own page concedes the pattern in one jurisdiction: customers from the EU reaching a localized experience on an EU country-code top-level domain aren’t automatically redirected, though EU customers on a .com or .shop still are. Google’s recommended alternative is hyperlinks to the other versions so users can choose.

Our position, and it’s the one we build: a visible country and language selector, plus a dismissible recommendation banner, and no forced redirect. That’s harder to ship than it used to be, because Shopify’s Geolocation app, which recommended rather than redirected and required the customer to accept, stopped being installable on February 1, 2025 and was shut down and uninstalled from stores on March 24, 2025. Every build now needs theme work or a third-party app to get the recommend-don’t-redirect behavior.

If you’re moving an existing store onto a new international URL structure, every old URL needs a mapped destination before launch, whichever structure you pick. Our SEO migration checklist covers the sequence, and the same discipline applies whether you’re changing platforms or just changing paths.

Local currency display is not local payment. Shopify states that only stores with Shopify Payments or Adyen as the primary gateway can process payments in a customer’s local currency. On any other gateway, local currency only changes how prices are displayed, conversion happens at checkout in your store’s default currency, and the customer may be charged an additional conversion fee by their own payment provider.

That’s a real cost with no upside. Your buyer sees a euro price, gets charged in dollars, and finds a foreign transaction fee on their statement. If your gateway isn’t Shopify Payments or Adyen, your localized pricing is cosmetic and your checkout is leaking for a reason your analytics won’t name.

Shopify Payments is available to businesses in 40 countries and regions, per the supported countries list. That’s where your business has to be located, not where you can sell, and it isn’t every EU member state, so check the list rather than assuming coverage.

Then check what buyers in your target country actually reach for, because a card form is not a default everywhere. Shopify’s local payment methods documentation lists iDEAL and Wero in the Netherlands, Bancontact in Belgium, BLIK and Przelewy24 in Poland, MB WAY and Multibanco in Portugal, TWINT in Switzerland, MobilePay in Denmark and Finland, EPS in Austria with euro currency required, Meses sin intereses in Mexico, Klarna across a range of European countries, and Swish in Sweden for Shopify Plus stores only. ACH Direct Debit is US B2B orders only.

Two conditions govern all of them. Countries outside your business location must be set up as markets before you can offer these methods, and each method works only when the customer is in a supported country and selects an eligible currency. So the payment decision is downstream of your market configuration, not parallel to it.

Shopify’s Spring ’26 Editions page announces more here: MobilePay, TWINT, BLIK, and Przelewy24 in more countries, multi-currency payouts in the US, Hong Kong, and Singapore with France flagged as coming, and label charges payable in CAD, EUR, GBP, or your local currency without conversion. Those are announcements on a marketing page rather than confirmed shipped behavior, so verify anything you’re depending on inside your admin.

Two numbers describe the whole translation project. Every Shopify subscription plan except Lite lets you sell in up to 20 languages from a single store, and Shopify supports 33 pre-translated checkout options, professionally translating checkout, the cookie banner, the privacy policy, the data sales opt-out page, and default content for themes it builds. The Translate & Adapt app automatically translates a maximum of two languages.

Everything between two and twenty is paid apps, human translators, or CSV work. Shopify also lists 14 languages that automatic translation doesn’t support at all, and policies can only be translated manually.

The exclusions are what derail launch dates. Collection filters, forms built with the Shopify Forms app, manual payment method instructions, product images, and tags can’t be translated, along with third-party app content that isn’t exposed as a Shopify translatable resource. Any text baked into an image is a design task, not a translation task, which means your hero banners and your size charts need a localization plan of their own.

One configuration detail: language settings are per-market only when international domains are configured. Without them, your language settings apply across all active markets, which is not what you want the day you add a second locale.

This is not tax advice. Thresholds, triggers, and effective dates change, and where you register is a question for a cross-border tax advisor or the relevant authority, not for a blog post. What follows is what the primary sources say as of August 2026, with dates.

The $800 de minimis exemption for commercial shipments is gone. CBP’s interim final rule at 91 FR 37789, published and effective June 24, 2026, implements an indefinite suspension for imports valued at $800 or less arriving by all modes other than the international postal network, meaning those entries must use formal or informal entry procedures. The companion rule at 91 FR 37801 took effect for the postal channel on July 24, 2026, matching the existing executive-order suspension with a regulatory one, and set up a new postal informal entry process for mail shipments valued at $2,500 or less. Two categories of mail get a delayed compliance date of October 22, 2026 before they must file formal entry: goods subject to partner government agency requirements, and goods claiming HTSUS Chapter 98 or 99 treatment or duty-free treatment under a free trade agreement.

Bona fide gifts and personal articles accompanying travelers are unaffected, which is why this is scoped to commercial shipments.

The suspension itself predates both rules. Duty-free de minimis treatment was suspended for all countries effective August 29, 2025, and Shopify’s own duties documentation states the same thing: de minimis doesn’t apply to US shipments, and duties and import taxes apply to all US imports regardless of value.

Didn’t the Supreme Court strike this down? No. On February 20, 2026 the Court held in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose additional tariffs, and Executive Order 14389 terminated those IEEPA duties the same day.

CBP’s rule states directly that the decision did not address the suspension of the de minimis administrative exemption, and Executive Order 14388, also dated February 20, 2026, continued the suspension. The tariffs ended; the de minimis suspension didn’t.

There’s also a permanent version coming. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, enacted July 4, 2025, statutorily terminates de minimis effective July 1, 2027, so today’s position is indefinite suspension by regulation with statutory termination scheduled.

One more line item to check rather than assume. Proclamation 11012, issued February 20, 2026 under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, imposed a 10 percent ad valorem surcharge on certain imports for a period of up to 150 days. Nothing we can source confirms its current status, so check current CBP guidance before you model landed cost around it.

The EU didn’t abolish duty on small parcels, it replaced the exemption with a charge. Since July 1, 2026 a 3 euro temporary customs duty applies per item on consignments valued up to 150 euro sold in distance sales, running until July 1, 2028 when the EU Customs Data Hub for e-commerce is expected to be operational. It applies regardless of VAT scheme, including IOSS, with limited exceptions under preferential trade agreements. This follows the announced removal of the 150 euro customs duty exemption threshold.

Per item is the commercially important phrase, and the EU defines it by tariff classification rather than by quantity. Its own worked example: five T-shirts in one consignment count as one item and attract 3 euro, while one T-shirt plus one watch counts as two items and attracts 6 euro. So a multi-SKU order into the EU is not a single 3 euro charge, and multiplying by unit count overstates it. Model your actual basket composition with a customs advisor rather than estimating from average order value.

The current UK rule still stands. For consignments valued at 135 pounds or less, the seller charges and accounts for VAT at the point of sale, except on B2B sales where the customer provides a UK VAT number and the reverse charge applies. Above that, normal VAT and customs rules apply on importation.

GOV.UK also states that the 135 pound limit applies to the value of the total consignment imported, not to the separate value of individual items inside it, which is the exact opposite of the EU’s per-item rule two sections up. That guidance page was last updated in May 2022, so it’s stable rather than actively maintained.

One of the two 135 pound rules is changing, and it isn’t the VAT one. The government said in June 2026 that it has accelerated the scrapping of customs duty relief on low value imports by six months, to October 2028, so goods at or under 135 pounds will become subject to customs import duties then. The VAT-at-point-of-sale rule above is a separate mechanism and neither source announces an end date for it. Anyone telling you the 135 pound customs relief is already gone in 2026 is two years early.

Registration is the through-line across all three jurisdictions. Each destination has its own threshold, its own registration process, and its own filing cadence, which is precisely the workload Managed Markets is charging you to absorb. That’s the fee justified in one sentence, and it’s why the fork-one answer changes as your destination count grows.

Sourced failure points, in the order we tend to find them in audits:

Two EU compliance surfaces belong on the same list. GPSR took effect in December 2024 and regulates the advertising and sale of consumer products in the European Union, requiring an EU Responsible Person with contact details when the manufacturer isn’t EU-based, plus identifying elements and warnings in the language of each country you sell into. And the EU Price Indication Directive requires that any announced price reduction display the lowest price charged in the previous 30 days, including promotional prices, which constrains how you can run a promo calendar in EU markets.

Product review takes time to clear. Shopify screens products before and after Managed Markets activation for prohibited and restricted items, and requires accurate country of origin, descriptions, and categorization under its Standard Product Taxonomy. A catalog with sloppy taxonomy data will fail this, and fixing it is a data project, not a settings change.

Answer fork one first, because the merchant-of-record decision determines whether the other five are yours to make. Then duty terms, because DDP picks your carrier. Then catalogs, because pricing and availability rules cascade into everything downstream.

Then domains, because URL structure is the most expensive thing on this list to change later. Payments and translation come last, and both are gated by market configuration you’ll already have done.

Shopify Markets gives you the machinery for all six. It doesn’t make any of the calls. The single catalog serving every destination is the default, and the auto-redirect Google explicitly advises against is one toggle away. Neither is right past your second country.

If you’re already selling cross-border and can’t tell which of these six is costing you money, that’s what a Growth Audit is for. Not a sales call. A clear look at where your international setup is leaking, and what to fix first. Talk to our team, or read more about how we work as a Shopify Partner.