Shopify is known for making it incredibly easy and fast to launch a business, and now Shopify can help you grow and scale your business just as easily and quickly.
Markets has been redesigned as a new dedicated screen in the Shopify Admin that brings all of your business growth activity into one central location and will be available to all Shopify customers in the coming months.
What is a Market?
Previously known as Shopify’s cross-border selling solution, Markets has evolved into a one-stop shop for expansion with Shopify. Markets not only enables international expansion, but also growth through retail and B2B (B2B is only available on the Plus plan).
Additionally, businesses can customize everything from catalogs to store themes, currencies, and domains within one shop, creating a buyer experience that’s tailored to each market.
What are the benefits of using the Market?
Targeted at businesses at all stages of growth, Markets can accommodate any expansion journey, whether you’re a new Shopify customer looking to expand internationally, a growing business selling B2B, or a business that already operates a network of retail stores.
Think of your market as your command center for growth. It’s the place where you can see all the markets you operate in, compare their performance, expand your business to new countries or try out new business models.
In the coming months, if you’re selling cross-border, B2B, or retail on Shopify, you’ll automatically see your existing markets within the new Marketplace interface. And if you’re not yet expanding your business and not sure where to start, you can access Marketplaces to get started right away.
Grow your business from one place with Shopify
Until now, cross-border, B2B, and Shopify POS were spread across the Shopify platform. Marketplaces bring all your growth together in one place in your Shopify admin. Whether you’re starting to sell to new countries, expanding to new B2B markets, or setting up a retail marketplace, the process is consistent: just create a new marketplace, customize it, and you’re ready to go.
Deliver a highly customized buyer experience
One of the best things about Markets is the ability to customize your buyers’ experience, all from one shop.
Marketplace allows you to customize your catalog (a list of products and their associated prices), store theme, currency, language, content, domain, and business entities to curate exactly the shopping experience you want to provide to specific buyers in specific markets.
This allows you to set up a customized buyer experience, for example ensuring that:
- Japanese D2C buyers can view product listings and associated prices, all in Japanese Yen.
- UK-based B2B buyers will see a specially customized version of the store theme with a special banner.
- The New York flagship store stocks only best-selling items.
Get a complete picture of all your expansions
Markets allows you to see all of your business growth activity at any time, from the highest level of detail to the most granular level.
From the Market Index, you can easily view all the markets you operate in and compare your performance. For your convenience, Shopify pins your top markets to the top of the page.
Markets also provide a detailed overview of all the customizations you’ve made for each market, which is a great tool to help get new employees up and running quickly.
Any work that you do to customize the buyer experience in your marketplace is also reflected in the Products section of your Shopify admin, allowing you to preview the exact list of products and prices, or the exact version of your PDP, that a particular buyer in a particular marketplace will see.
Simple and fast growth
Markets makes it easy to scale your business – there’s no need for lengthy or repetitive integration processes, no need to split up your inventory or sync data across multiple stores.
Markets also allows you to quickly create new markets by tweaking existing ones, so you don’t have to waste time creating each market from scratch.
How the market works
Let’s say you want to expand into the UK. First, create a new market and add the UK as a region.
You can then customise your catalogue for the UK market, ensuring that your products, prices and availability are what you want to present to UK buyers.
You can also customize your store’s theme to suit your UK customers.
For example, let’s say you’re starting to become popular in the UK and you’re on the Plus plan, so you decide to start selling wholesale in the region. Simply create a new marketplace and add the UK region and the locations of your UK B2B buyer companies.
Markets automatically inherits all customizations from the UK marketplace, allowing you to tweak the catalogs and themes to best suit your B2B buyers.
How Markets makes international, B2B and retail sales easy
Already doing cross-border, retail, or B2B sales on Shopify? When Markets rolls out in the coming months, you won’t need to opt-in and you’ll be able to access all your existing markets from the Markets interface.
In addition to conveniently consolidating all your extension activity, Markets also adds new features and capabilities to Shopify’s cross-border, retail, and B2B selling solutions. Check out the sections below for more details.
Cross-border sales to markets
Market has been moved to the main Shopify navigation, and the experience has been redesigned to make it easier to see the customizations you’ve made for specific markets.
It’s also now possible to create submarkets from existing markets: for example, if you have a European market, but want to customize your online store for Germany, you can quickly create a German submarket (which will automatically inherit all the customizations you’ve already made for the European market) and simply customize your theme for German buyers.
For store owners based in the United States, Shopify offers Managed MarketIt is an evolution of the product formerly known as Markets Pro and is fully integrated with the new Markets. Managed Markets simplifies international selling with an integrated sales executive model that manages all the complexities of cross-border selling, including international payments, customs regulations, tariffs, and shipping.
Retail sales at the market
Markets allow store owners using Shopify POS to set up specific catalogs and manage pricing and publishing for their retail stores, all from one shop. They can also customize the POS smart grid for each market to tailor the in-store experience for different retail stores.
This allows you to run all your POS locations in different countries from one Shopify store, for example by using customized catalogs and smart grids to map all locations in your US retail market to a US entity and Shopify Payments account, while keeping your Australian retail market connected to an Australian entity and Shopify Payments account.
B2B sales on the market
When Markets is released, store owners on the Plus plan will be able to customize store themes for different B2B markets from a single store. They will also be able to create unique catalog versions for multiple B2B markets from the Markets interface, facilitating geographic expansion of their wholesale business.
Start a Market
Keep an eye out for Markets, which will be available to all Shopify customers in the coming months.
