What is the difference between multi store and Shopify Markets?
Shopify Plus is a highly efficient platform for international management. It allows us to address different markets, with different catalogs, pricing structures, currencies, taxes, and country-specific nuances.
However, addressing internationalization in Shopify can be approached in two ways. You can either use different sites grouped together under a license, or use Shopify Markets, a feature designed to handle various markets seamlessly.
DATASOLUTION has set up Shopify sites that sell internationally for BARBARA BUI, PIERRE HARDY, and Cotélac. We have tested the advantages and drawbacks of different international architectures for these platforms.
So what are the real advantages and disadvantages of each solution?
Let’s take a look at the differences and how DATASOLUTION has overcome a number of customer challenges using Shopify.
Introducing Shopify Markets
Through Shopify Markets, you can efficiently manage various aspects in each country, including:
- Domain
- Language
- Content
- Offered products
- Currency
- Customs fee collection
- Shipping rates
- Collection of local VAT
On the left, it is a screenshot illustrating how a market is managed in Shopify Markets.
For instance, we utilize Shopify Markets for the Barbara Bui project to address both the French and European markets on a single website.
Our experts use Shopify Markets to manage multilingualism and shipping specifications.
Here are some key considerations regarding the use of Shopify Markets (Note: The PSP will be common across all countries).
- The website functionalities and IT workflows will be uniform across all markets, but the content may vary between countries.
- It is important to highlight that BackOffice users have access to all international features.
- Shopify Markets is not suitable if you have subsidiaries with different legal entities that need to manage their own sites.
Additionally, it’s essential to be aware that Shopify Markets is continuously evolving. For instance, the functionality to localize catalogs by country was released in February 2023. Therefore, it is crucial to regularly monitor the Shopify changelog to stay informed about updates.
Excerpt from the Shopify Markets changelog in early 2023:
Introduction to Multi-Store
The multi-store approach involves having different sites within the same Shopify Plus license.
Shopify Plus allows for up to 10 different sites, whether they are different markets, B2C or B2B sites, or even instances for production and pre-production.
Opting for a multi-store architecture internationally provides much finer control over the market, offering the following features:
- Domain
- Language
- Content
- Offered products
- Currency
- Customs fee collection
- Shipping rates
- Collection of local VAT
- User management
- Different functionalities
- Different legal localization
- Different PSP (Payment Service Provider)
As you can see, there are many more possibilities with a dedicated site per geographical area than with Shopify Markets.
To meet the needs of our customer PIERRE HARDY on Shopify, we separated the American site from the French site to have different PSP, especially because the American site has different functionalities than the French site.
However, this approach comes with considerations:
- Having different sites involves more significant maintenance, and careful attention must be paid to synchronized stock management across all stores
- Application fees are charged per site. The more sites we have, the higher the fees will be. It is therefore important to pay attention to the operating costs associated with these applications
A few years ago, for international expansion on Shopify, it was necessary to have an architecture with different sites or an application that overloaded the main site with translations like Transcy or Weglot, which are not optimal in terms of SEO (natural referencing).
Shopify Markets is a native feature of Shopify that appeared two years ago and is an excellent solution for a quick international launch.
Each situation is unique based on the brand ecosystem, but in this guide, you have various arguments to make an informed choice in terms of architecture.
A project?
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Yann FRESSIGNAUD
Managing director
