Shopify international pricing

Last week, and without a great deal of fanfare, Shopify rolled out a significant new feature: International Pricing. This is pretty big news for brands selling on the platform.

Shopify has supported multi currency within a single store for some time via currency conversions. This functionality converts pricing in your store’s base currency to other supported currencies. You can apply rounding rules to these so that you don’t end up selling products for weird amounts such as €13.76. You can also choose whether to use the prevailing or a fixed exchange rate: the latter giving more stability over pricing but leaving you open to fluctuations in rates.

But what most international brands need is the ability to have specific price lists per currency or region, e.g. to sell an item at £100, €110 and $140. Previously on Shopify the only way to achieve this was to run multiple stores. This is a well-established and workable solution could still be the way you choose to do it (especially for Plus customers who get 10 stores as part of their subscription).

Now though there is the option to have specific pricing per country, all running from a single store. There are benefits to this, namely:

• Simplicity of management: running a single store is easier than managing multiple stores. With the right app/ERP/CMS integrations, multi-store management can be a straightforward process - but a single store will always be simpler.
• Analytics & marketing: ditto the above
• App costs: whilst you can get discounts when running apps across multiple stores, with a single store you’ll only ever pay for a single installation

We think any brand that needs price lists per currency should be taking a serious look at this. There are, as of today, a few caveats: 

• You must be using Shopify Payments - other gateways aren’t supported
• You currently upload pricing via CSV. This might rule out anyone with an ERP integration from switching today, but Shopify have indicated that API support for international pricing is coming very soon so you may want to get this on your roadmap
• There is limited support for PayPal express, which will revert to the store’s base currency
• You can’t set currency-specific shipping prices - these are still converted. However, by fixing the exchange rate you can easily set sensible charges for different regions/currencies

This functionality is very much in active development so expect the above to change over the coming weeks and months. Along with existing support for multiple languages, international domains, native Avalara integration as well as the upcoming duties feature - enabling Delivery Duty Paid (DDP) capability - Shopify Plus offers merchants a complete suite of cross-border capability.