Selling internationally on Shopify.

Pick one country and earn the right to a second

The most common way an international launch fails is opening eight markets at once. Each one carries its own tax treatment, its own duty thresholds, its own preferred payment methods, its own delivery expectations and its own returns behaviour, and eight sets of those problems arriving in the same week means none of them get solved.

Choose on evidence you already hold rather than ambition. Your analytics show where international sessions come from and where they abandon. Your customer service inbox shows who asks whether you ship to them. Your existing international orders, the ones people already fought through your checkout to place, are the strongest signal there is. Pick the country with the most of those, and add the second only once the first is boring.

Two supporting arguments for going narrow. Localisation done properly is real work, and doing it once well beats doing it eight times badly. And the operational tail, meaning returns, customs disputes and support in another timezone, is where the cost actually lives, so you want to meet it in one country first.

Markets or Managed Markets

Shopify offers two quite different things under similar names, and the choice is partly made for you by where your business is registered.

• Shopify Markets is the native toolkit inside your admin. You create a market, decide which countries belong to it, and configure currency, pricing, catalogue availability, domains and duty collection per market. You remain the seller. You are responsible for your own tax registrations, thresholds and compliance in every country you sell into. It is available to merchants generally.
• Managed Markets layers Global-e underneath, acting as merchant of record for the international order. That transfers tax registration and remittance, local payment methods, duty and import tax handling and compliance onto them, in exchange for a fee on those orders. It is the low-operations option.

The catch that decides it for many brands: Shopify's documentation restricts Managed Markets to merchants based in the continental United States, plus certain stores in Canada and the United Kingdom. If your business is registered in India, Managed Markets is not on the table. That is not a temporary gap to wait out; it is the current shape of the product, and it means an Indian D2C brand selling into the US or the Gulf is running Shopify Markets plus its own duty and tax arrangements, either through a landed-cost provider or a carrier that handles DDP.

Where Managed Markets is available, the question is arithmetic. Its fee against the cost of registering for tax, filing in each jurisdiction and staffing the operational work yourself. For a brand doing modest international volume, outsourcing usually wins. For a brand where international is a large and growing share of revenue, running it directly eventually wins, and the crossover is worth modelling rather than guessing.

Who pays the duty is the whole customer experience

There are two ways to run a cross-border order, and they produce completely different outcomes.

• Delivered duty paid. Duty and import tax are calculated and charged at checkout, the parcel clears customs prepaid, and the courier hands it over with nothing to collect. The customer sees a higher total at checkout and pays nothing afterwards.
• Delivered at place. The customer pays duty, import tax and often a broker handling fee to the courier at delivery. The checkout total looks better. The doorstep total is a surprise.

The second one is where international programmes go to die, and the damage is not just the one order. A customer who is asked for an unexpected payment before they can have the parcel they already paid for either refuses it, which sends it back at your cost, or accepts it and never orders again. Shopify's own guidance on the tradeoff is direct: collecting at checkout is what avoids the delays and refusals.

Charge duty at checkout from your first international order. Never train a market to expect a surprise, then try to withdraw it later.

What changed for parcels into the United States

If the US is your target market, one change matters more than anything else in this guide. As of 29 August 2025, duties and import taxes apply to all US imports regardless of shipment value. The low-value threshold that let small parcels enter duty-free is gone.

The consequences are concrete. A pricing model built on small orders slipping under a de minimis floor no longer works. Every parcel needs proper customs data. And the gap between a DDP checkout and a DAP surprise widened, because the surprise now arrives on orders that never used to trigger one. Any brand still running US-bound orders on assumptions formed before that date is quietly accumulating refused deliveries.

Your catalogue data is the part everyone skips

Duty calculation is only as good as the product data behind it, and this is unglamorous work that gets deferred until it breaks something.

• HS codes are required for all international orders. Without them, calculations fall back to product descriptions and categories, and where those are thin the estimate degrades or is skipped entirely. An estimate that is wrong in the customer's favour is a bill you absorb; wrong the other way is a checkout that overcharges.
• Country of origin belongs on every product. Where the goods were made, not where you ship from. It drives duty rates and it drives eligibility for trade agreements.
• Preferential trade agreements are applied by default. Shopify includes treaty treatment such as USMCA in its calculations. If you cannot supply the documentation to support a claim, that behaviour can be turned off, and it should be, rather than promising a rate you cannot evidence.
• Brokerage and disbursement fees cannot be collected through checkout. If your carrier charges them, they have to be built into your shipping rates instead, or you are paying them.
• DDP label support is carrier-specific. Through Shopify, DDP labels are supported by a limited set of carriers including DHL Express services, DHL eCommerce, and Canada Post for US-bound shipments. Confirm your carrier can actually produce a prepaid-duty label before you promise one at checkout.

Pricing, currency and the storefront

• Price per market, do not just convert. Live conversion produces prices like 27.43, and it ignores that duty, local shipping and local competitors all differ. Set deliberate market prices with sensible rounding.
• Show the local currency early. A customer who reaches checkout before discovering the price was in a foreign currency has been misled by your storefront, and they leave.
• Offer the payment methods the market actually uses. Card coverage varies more than founders expect, and in several markets the dominant method is not a card at all. This is frequently the single largest conversion gap in a new market.
• Localise the details that signal legitimacy. Sizing conventions, units, spelling, delivery estimates in local terms, and a returns policy written for that country. These are small changes with outsized trust effects.
• Decide your URL structure once. Subfolders or country domains, then hreflang so search engines understand the relationship. Changing your mind later costs rankings.

Returns, support and the boring operational tail

An international return that has to travel back to your origin warehouse frequently costs more than the item. Decide the policy before launch, not after the first request. The options are a local return address in-market, a returnless refund below a value threshold where the economics favour it, or a clearly stated policy that the customer bears return shipping, which is legitimate as long as it is stated plainly before purchase and not discovered afterwards.

Support hours matter too. If your first market is twelve hours out of phase with your team, a customer waits a day for every reply and the thread takes a week. Publish response windows honestly rather than implying a speed you cannot hold.

What to measure

Track per market, never blended. Blended international numbers hide both the market that is working and the one that is bleeding.

• Conversion rate for that market against your home market, which is the fastest read on whether pricing and payment methods fit.
• Checkout abandonment at the shipping and duty step specifically.
• Delivery refusal and return-to-origin rate, the clearest signal that duty is being collected wrongly.
• Contribution margin after duty, shipping, FX and returns. Revenue per market is a vanity number until this is positive.
• Support ticket volume per hundred orders, which is what tells you whether the operational tail is sustainable before it becomes unsustainable.

Common mistakes

• Enabling every country because the toggle is there. Shipping availability is not a market strategy, and it commits you to support and returns you have not planned.
• Leaving customers to pay duty at the door. The cheapest-looking option, and the most expensive one.
• Launching without HS codes. The calculations silently degrade, and you find out through disputes.
• Assuming Managed Markets is available to you. Check your business location against Shopify's eligibility before you build a plan on it.
• Ignoring the US de minimis change. Pricing built for a duty-free floor that no longer exists breaks on contact with customs.
• Judging a market on revenue. Contribution margin after every cross-border cost is the only number that tells you whether to open the second country.

FAQ