Shopify, the leading global commerce platform, has launched Shopify Markets: a centralised hub with all the tools needed for merchants to manage global commerce.

Now, New Zealand merchants can use Shopify Markets to identify, set up, launch, and optimize international markets—all from a single Shopify store.

Shopify already powers cross-border commerce for our merchants with solutions like international domains and multicurrency, empowering merchants to generate US$20 billion in cross-border sales in 2020 alone. But we know that the appetite for international commerce is only growing: in July 2021, 36 percent of all traffic to Shopify stores in New Zealand came from international buyers, with 30 percent of Shopify New Zealand merchants like Jamie Kay already selling cross-border.

For merchants, selling outside of their home country can still be daunting. Complexities like currency conversion, language localisation, providing local payment methods, and duty and import taxes can all act as barriers to effectively selling internationally, especially if you don’t know where to start. Enter Shopify Markets.

Shaun Broughton, Managing Director APAC, Shopify, says the pandemic and resulting lockdown regulations have pushed Kiwi merchants to reimagine the possibilities of retail and take a serious look at the growing opportunities in overseas markets.

“The new Shopify Markets will help local businesses leverage these opportunities and unlock the true potential of borderless commerce by selling to overseas buyers more easily and effectively.”

With Shopify Markets, merchants can: 

• Enter new markets easily: With just a few clicks, merchants can enable new markets and open their business to more global customers. Merchants can then manage these markets from a central dashboard for a unified view of their entire business.
• Increase buyer trust and conversion with tailored experiences for each market: Shopify has seen that the conversion rates for storefronts with localised languages and currencies is up to 1.13x and 1.40x higher, respectively. To help merchants deliver meaningful experiences to their customers across regions, Shopify Markets will help merchants easily customise:
  • Local currencies and payment methods
  • Pricing and price rounding rules per market
  • Product availability per market 
  • Local languages 
  • Local domains with automatic SEO optimisation
  • Automatically show the right currency / language based on buyer country
  • Duties and import taxes on behalf of the buyer to eliminate surprise costs at product delivery (merchants can now account for these fees at checkout)

• Optimise cross-border operations with actionable insights and smart settings: Insights surfaced by Shopify will help merchants determine where, when, and how to most effectively sell in a new region based on aggregate data from Shopify’s more than 1.7 million merchants globally. Smart settings let merchants automatically optimise for the best results, without needing a dedicated global operations team. For example, merchants won’t need to keep track of what local payment methods are most popular in each market. Shopify knows what converts best, and will automatically surface the best payment methods at checkout.

• Save time with a central global management platform: Merchants can seamlessly create localised storefronts from one store, which means they can manage all cross-border commerce in a single place in the Shopify admin with tailored consumer experiences in each market—whether that market is a country, like the United States, or a region, like all of Europe. Merchants will have a unified view of their entire business and monitor how their business is performing in activated markets—both domestic and international—thanks to Shopify’s centralised commerce platform.
  

Visit shopify.com/markets to learn more.