Shopify is known for helping businesses get up and running with incredible ease and speed. And now, Shopify is going to help you grow and expand your business just as easily and just as fast.
Markets has been reimagined as a new, dedicated surface in Shopify admin that aggregates all of a business’s expansion activity into one central location, coming soon to all Shopify customers over the next few months.
What is Markets?
Markets, formerly known as Shopify’s cross-border selling solution, has evolved to become a one-stop shop for expansion on Shopify. Markets enables growth not only via international expansion, but also through retail and B2B (B2B is available on Plus plans only).
What’s more, businesses will be able to customize everything from their catalog to their store’s theme, currency, domains and business entities—all within a single shop—in order to create customized buyer experiences for each of their markets.
What are the benefits of using Markets?
Markets is for businesses in every stage of growth and able to accommodate any expansion journey, whether you’re a brand new customer on Shopify looking to expand internationally, a scaling business selling B2B, or an enterprise already operating a network of retail stores.
Think of Markets as your command center for growth: the place to see all the markets you operate in, to compare their performance, and to expand your business to new countries or experiment with new business models.
In the next few months, if you’re already selling cross-border, B2B, or retail with Shopify, you’ll automatically start seeing your existing markets within the new Markets interface. And if you haven’t yet expanded your business and you’re not sure where to begin, you’ll be able to jump into Markets and get started.
Grow your business from one central place on Shopify
Previously, cross-border, B2B, and Shopify POS were spread out across Shopify’s platform. Markets aggregates all your growth into one location in Shopify admin. If you want to start selling to a new country, expand to a new B2B market, or set up a retail market, the process stays consistent: simply create a new market, make your customizations, and you’re ready to go.
Offer extremely customized buyer experiences
One of the best things about Markets is the customization it enables for your buyer experiences, all possible from one single shop.
Markets lets you customize your catalog (the list of products and their associated prices), your store’s theme, currency, languages, content, domains and business entities to curate the exact shopping experience you want to provide for a specific buyer in a specific market.
This allows you to set up customized buyer experiences, ensuring, for example:
- Your D2C buyers in Japan see a specific list of products and associated prices, all in Japanese yen
- Your B2B buyers based in the UK see a version of your store theme especially customized with a special banner, just for them
- That you’ve stocked only your bestsellers at your New York flagship retail store
See a holistic picture of all your expansion
With Markets, you’ll be able to see all the expansion activity of your business at any given time, from the highest level of detail to the most granular.
From the Markets index, you can easily view all the markets you’re operating in, and compare their performance. Shopify pins your key markets at the top of the page for your convenience.
Markets also offers you a detailed summary of all the customizations you’ve made for each market—a great tool for bringing new employees up to speed.
The work you do to customize your buyer experience in Markets will also be reflected in the Products section of Shopify admin, enabling you to preview the exact list of products and prices, or the exact version of your PDP that a specific buyer in a specific market would see.
Simple, rapid growth
Expanding your business with Markets is easy: no long integration times, no repetitive processes, and no need to split inventory or keep data in sync between multiple stores.
Markets also lets you quickly create new markets by tweaking to any of your existing ones, so you won’t have to waste any time creating each market from scratch.
How Markets works
Let’s say you’re hoping to expand to the UK. To start, you’d create a new market and add the UK as a region.
You can then customize your catalog for your UK market, making sure that the products, pricing, and availability are what you want to surface to your UK buyers.
You can also customize your store’s theme to be tailored to your UK audience.
Let’s say you start getting traction in the UK, and, because you are on a Plus plan, you decide to start selling wholesale in the region. Simply create a new market, and add your UK region and your UK B2B buyer company locations.
Markets automatically inherits all your customizations from your UK market, and you can tweak your catalog and theme to be just right for your B2B buyers.
How Markets makes international, B2B, and retail selling easier
Already selling cross-border, retail, or B2B on Shopify? Once Markets rolls out in a few months, you won’t need to opt in—you’ll simply be able to access all your existing markets from the Markets interface.
In addition to this convenient aggregation for all your expansion activity, Markets will also add new features and capabilities to Shopify’s cross-border, retail and B2B selling solutions. You can check out more details in each section below.
Selling cross-border with Markets
Markets has now moved to the main Shopify navigation, and the experience has been redesigned to make it easier to see the customizations you’ve made for a specific market.
It’s also now possible to create submarkets from an existing market. For example, if you have a market for Europe but you want to customize your online store specifically for Germany, you can quickly create a Germany submarket (automatically inheriting all the customizations you had already made for your European market) and then just customize your theme specifically for your German buyers.
For store owners based in the US, Shopify also offers Managed Markets—an evolution of the product formerly known as Markets Pro—which is fully integrated with the new Markets. Managed Markets simplifies international selling with an integrated merchant-of-record model that manages all the complexities of cross-border selling, including international payments, customs regulations, duties, shipping, and more.
Selling retail with Markets
Markets will enable store owners using Shopify POS to set specific catalogs to manage pricing and publishing for your retail locations, all from one shop. You can also customize the POS smart grid per market to adjust the in-store experience for different retail locations.
This would allow you, for example, to run all your POS locations in different countries, all from a single Shopify store. You could also have all your locations in your US retail market mapped to your US business entity and Shopify Payments account with a customized catalog and smart grid, while your Australia retail market can remain connected to your Australian entity and Shopify Payments account.
Selling B2B with Markets
When Markets launches, store owners on Plus plans will be able to customize their store theme for different B2B markets from a single store. Additionally, it will be possible to create unique versions of their catalog for multiple B2B markets, all from the Markets interface, enabling easy geographic expansion for wholesale businesses.
Getting started with Markets
Look out for Markets, becoming available to all Shopify customers over the next few months.