Your Guide to Selling Internationally on Shopify

Going global isn’t just about translating your product pages or adding a currency converter—it’s about building localized experiences that resonate with your customers, wherever they are. For Shopify merchants, the journey to international growth can take many forms, and the right path depends on one crucial factor: your brand’s stage of maturity.

Whether you’re an early-stage brand testing demand in new markets, a growth-stage business fine-tuning the cross-border experience, or an enterprise merchant scaling across continents, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to internationalization. Fortunately, Shopify offers multiple flexible options, each designed to meet the needs of brands at different levels of operational complexity, team resources, and global ambition.

In this guide, we’ll break down the most common internationalization strategies merchants can take, mapped to your brand’s maturity level, size, and international goals, so you can expand with clarity, confidence, and a customer-first mindset.

Crawl 

International Sales Tools, Formerly Markets

For businesses taking their first cautious steps into international markets, simplicity and low-risk experimentation are key. In this phase, merchants are validating market demand and gaining initial exposure with minimal operational overhead.

Shopify’s International Sales Tools enable centralized control over your international business, from launch to setup and ongoing optimization. Markets can be managed individually for full control or grouped to streamline regional efforts. 

You can build region-specific experiences that adapt to local expectations: translated content, localized pricing, currency conversion, and duty-inclusive checkout. Instead of managing multiple stores, you can oversee all global activity from one backend, giving your team a clear view of performance while reducing operational costs.

Ideal for: Emerging DTC brands, growing SMBs, or merchants looking to test 2–3 new markets, without the overhead of managing multiple storefronts.

Walk

Shopify Managed Markets, Formerly Shopify Markets Pro

Once a brand has validated international demand, the next step is scaling more deliberately. At this stage, merchants require more operational support to manage compliance and logistics without getting overwhelmed.

Shopify Managed Markets expands on Shopify’s core international sales tools by adding a layer of turnkey infrastructure—powered by Global-e—to help U.S.-based merchants scale internationally, faster and with less risk.

With Managed Markets, Global-e becomes the merchant of record, handling critical cross-border responsibilities on your behalf. That means they take care of tax registration and remittance, local payment processing, duties and import fees, and compliance with regional regulations—so your team doesn’t have to.

• Automate Calculating Duties and Taxes: Built-in Nexus calculation

• International tax and duty compliance: Managed Markets offload international tax filing, registration, and remittance. 

• Shipping as a service: Global-e takes full responsibility for shipping, including billing disputes, helping merchants simplify operational complexities, and ensuring shipments reach customers.

• Restriction management: Restricted items are automatically removed from catalogs so buyers only see items they can purchase in their region.

• Fraud protection: Multiple fraud platforms ensure merchants are protected when fraud does occur on international orders.

• Guaranteed foreign exchange: Merchants don’t have to worry about the financial risk of currency changes or volatility on refunds because the exchange rates are underwritten.

For emerging and growing brands, this dramatically lowers the barrier to enter new markets. You can start selling globally without having to set up foreign entities or wrangle complex tax and shipping logistics.

Managed Markets is currently available to merchants based in the continental U.S. and is designed for those looking to accelerate global growth without building out an international operations team. It’s fully integrated into your Shopify admin, giving you a centralized view of performance, plus the operational scale and compliance coverage typically reserved for much larger enterprises.

Run

Expansion Stores & Hybrid Managed Markets

For fast-growing ecommerce brands, global expansion is often the first major milestone. Once international foundations are in place, brands must fine-tune the entire cross-border experience. This means:

• Localizing not just the language, but the checkout, payment methods, and promotions

• Building market-specific product assortments and fulfillment strategies

• Creating a regional content and marketing engine that feels natively tailored

For many enterprise merchants, this is the moment to graduate from a single-store setup to a multi-store architecture—one that allows granular control over the customer journey by region.

But such complexity brings new challenges: maintaining consistency, ensuring operational efficiency, and navigating compliance.

This is where brands start evaluating their tech stack—specifically:  Shopify Managed Markets vs. Global-e.

While Global-e powers Shopify Managed Markets, a direct integration with Global-e unlocks the platform’s full capabilities—offering a more scalable, customizable, and enterprise-ready solution for global commerce. 

Global-e is a fully managed cross-border ecommerce platform that simplifies international selling and elevates the global shopping experience. By combining advanced localization, intelligent market insights, and end-to-end logistics and compliance support, Global-e enables brands to deliver seamless, localized experiences in over 200 markets—without the complexity of managing it all in-house. 

Global-e Features 

Broad Market Reach

Global-e enables merchants to access over 200 global markets through a single integration. This dramatically accelerates international expansion and simplifies market entry at scale.

Comprehensive Localisation

Go far beyond basic storefront translation. With Global-e, you can tailor the customer experience to each market with localized pricing in 100+ currencies, 130+ relevant payment methods, and transparent taxes and duties. Shoppers see the full cost of their order upfront—no surprises at delivery.

Fully-Managed Service

Unlike Shopify Markets, where retailers must handle the entire sales operation, Global-e manages the complexities of international ecommerce for you, freeing your team to focus on product, marketing, and brand development.

Merchant of Record (MoR)

Global-e assumes the legal responsibility of selling in each market, simplifying compliance with international tax and import laws. You’ll receive a single invoice in your local currency, turning cross-border sales into domestic transactions.

Data-Driven Market Insights

Tap into proprietary market intelligence and BI models derived from billions of transactions. Use these insights to tailor pricing strategies, optimize shipping propositions, and maximize sales and profitability by market.

Expert Account Support

With access to dedicated global ecommerce specialists, brands receive ongoing strategic guidance, local best practices, and hands-on support. This direct partnership is a major differentiator from Shopify Markets Pro.

Advanced Logistics Infrastructure

Global-e offers streamlined outbound and inbound logistics through an extensive carrier network with reduced rates and flexible shipping options. The result: less complexity and lower overhead for your team.

Fraud Protection

Built-in fraud prevention measures safeguard both retailers and customers, improving payment acceptance rates while eliminating the risk of chargebacks or fraud-related losses.

Simplified Returns

A branded returns portal allows customers to easily return products internationally, enhancing the post-purchase experience and increasing confidence to buy.

Scale Smart, Sell Global

Expanding internationally is a major milestone, but it doesn't have to be a massive operational leap from day one. The most resilient and customer-centric brands grow globally by aligning strategy with stage: starting lean, learning fast, and scaling with intention.

Shopify’s internationalization stack gives you the freedom to do exactly that. Whether you're testing new markets, accelerating cross-border sales, or building fully localized experiences across regions, the platform adapts to your needs.

There is no singular playbook for going global, but there is a smarter path. Understanding your brand’s operational needs and analyzing your total cost of ownership is critical to finding the approach that fits. With the right structure in place—whether that’s Shopify’s built-in tools, Managed Markets, or a Global-e integration—you can choose the path that scales with you.