Shopify International SEO: Markets vs Separate Stores
This article is Chapter 8 of our 288-page Shopify SEO guide. Check out the full eBook.
Your Shopify store is doing well and you’re thinking of expanding into other countries or languages.
Or maybe you’re moving from another platform and want to keep your international setup in place.
Is Shopify a decent option for this?
These days, mostly yes. A few years ago I’d have said “not really”. Shopify has since built most of this into the platform with Shopify Markets, and it handles a lot of the SEO for you.
Let me explain…
Is Shopify / Shopify Plus suitable for international stores?
For most stores, yes.
Shopify Markets lets one store sell into several countries, with local currencies, translated content and country-specific URLs. Shopify generates the hreflang tags for you, which used to be the hardest part.
Where it still gets tricky is when each country needs a genuinely different store. Different product ranges, different branding, different teams running them. That’s when you look at separate stores instead.
So the decision comes down to one store with Markets or separate stores for each region.
What is Shopify Markets?
Shopify Markets is Shopify’s built-in way to sell internationally from a single store. You find it in your admin under Settings > Markets.
Each market is a country or group of countries. For each one you can set:
- The currency, with prices converted automatically (and rounded so they look less random)
- Price adjustments, or set prices for specific products in that market
- The languages available, with translations handled by Shopify’s Translate & Adapt app or a translation app
- How the market appears in your URLs: a subfolder (example.com**/fr/**), a subdomain (fr.example.com) or its own domain (example.fr)
This is the simplest setup by far. You manage one catalogue, one set of collections and one theme, and Shopify handles the local versions.
What are separate (expansion) stores?
The other route is running a separate Shopify store for each region. Shopify calls these expansion stores, and they’re mainly a Shopify Plus thing.
Each store is fully independent, usually on its own domain (example.co.uk, example.com.au).
This gives you full control over each location: completely different product ranges, collections, pricing, apps and checkout setup. But you’re now running several stores, and keeping them in sync is on you.
Which type of international setup is recommended?
The answer depends massively on your store and long-term objectives.
Below we’ll discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each, so you can make the call.
Benefits and drawbacks of Shopify Markets
The big benefit is ease. One store, one catalogue, one place to update. Add a market, pick its currency and language, and you’re most of the way there.
You also get more control than people expect. You can adjust prices per market, and translate product, collection and page content so it reads properly in each language.
From an SEO point of view, Markets does the heavy lifting. Shopify adds hreflang tags and handles the international URLs for you. You don’t have to hand-code anything.
Where it falls short is marketing. Every market is a version of the same store. If France needs a completely different range, different collections or a different brand voice, you’ll be fighting the setup. Translating is not the same as localising.
An example store using one store for several regions is Horizn-Studios:
Benefits and drawbacks of separate stores
The more flexible approach to marketing is a separate store for each location.
From an SEO and marketing standpoint, this allows full configuration of each store to target country-specific keywords and demographics. Building localised email lists is another example.
Beyond this, you can tailor each store to what people there expect: local payment options, local shipping, tax setup, invoicing, etc.
But with this added flexibility comes significantly more complexity.
You’ll need a way to keep products, collections and content in sync between stores. Or worse, manually update each of them, every time.
In short, this shouldn’t be done without consulting an expert.
An example store using separate stores is Gymshark:
How to set up Shopify Markets
If one store will do the job, here’s the short version. I’d still recommend getting help, but it’s very doable yourself.
- In your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Markets and add a market for each country or region you want to sell to.
- Set the currency for each market. Add rounding rules so prices look natural, and price adjustments if you don’t want straight exchange rates.
- Choose how each market shows in your URLs. For SEO, subfolders (example.com/fr/) are usually the easiest to grow, because they share your main domain’s authority. Separate domains work too, but each one has to build up its own.
- Add the languages you need, then translate your content with Translate & Adapt or a translation app.
- Make sure your theme shows a country/language selector. Most modern themes have one built in.
Accepting payment in local currencies depends on your payment provider (Shopify Payments supports it in most countries), so check that before you launch.
Don’t skip the translations
This is where most Markets setups go wrong for SEO.
If you add a French market but leave the content in English, you’ve just created a copy of your store at /fr/. That doesn’t help anyone rank in France.
Translate the pages that matter: collections, products, and the key pages people land on. Write the collection copy for how people in that country actually search, not a word-for-word translation of the English.
How to set up separate international stores
For separate stores, the process varies massively depending on your setup and objectives.
The main difficulty is that each one is a separate store (which you pay Shopify for separately), so the main question is how to connect them.
Automated product and data syncing
The ideal solution is an automated way of syncing between stores. This could be a PIM (Product Information Manager), a store sync app, or custom development work.
The goal is to automatically sync changes across all stores. Update a product, tag or important option on one store, and it updates on the others.
It’s more work to set up, but for scale and long-term management it’s strongly recommended.
Manually importing and exporting changes
Alternatively, you can manage changes by importing and exporting between stores.
This suits small stores with a small product selection.
The best way is to manage products and collections in a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet, then import the changes with a tool like Matrixify.
It’s not perfect, as you’ll have to import the changes each time, but it gets the job done.
SEO Considerations
Whichever route you take, you want each country to see the right version of your store in search. When someone searches on Google.it in Italian, they should find your Italian store, not your UK one.
Hreflang
This is done with hreflang tags, which tell search engines which version of a page is for which country and language.
For example:
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/fr/collections/sofas" hreflang="fr" />This tells search engines the French version of that collection lives at that URL.
With Shopify Markets, you don’t need to do this yourself. Shopify adds hreflang tags for your markets and languages automatically. Your job is to make sure the translated pages actually exist and are published, then check them in Search Console.
With separate stores, it’s on you. There’s no connection between the stores, so Shopify can’t know that example.com/products/red-bicycle and example.co.uk/products/red-bicycle are the same product.
Keeping the same handles across stores makes this much easier, so I’d highly recommend it. Even then, if your UK store has products your US store doesn’t, some hreflang tags will point to missing pages. You can exclude them with a metafield on each product, something like:
{% unless product.metafields.custom.exclude_fr %}
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.fr/products/{{ product.handle }}" hreflang="fr" />
{% endunless %}It can be done, but it’s something you should consult an SEO about.
Separate store differences
If you run one store with Markets, you’re in good shape. The hreflang setup is handled and everything stays connected.
With separate stores, there are decisions to make.
You probably want to translate your English articles into French. But should you have identical blog posts on your UK and US stores? Blog posts are fairly international. You can offer a popup to send visitors to their local store instead.
The benefit is the customisation. You’re not just translating, you can create extra collections and market things in a way each country would understand, then optimise each store for SEO on its own.
It’s significantly more work, but it makes SEO and other marketing much more effective.
Final Thoughts
Selling internationally on Shopify is a lot easier than it used to be.
For most stores, Shopify Markets is the answer. It handles currencies, translations, URLs and hreflang in one store.
Separate stores still make sense for bigger brands that need each country to be genuinely different, but they’re a lot more work to run.
If you’re not sure which way to go, my team and I usually help with the SEO side: picking the URL structure, making sure translations are indexed, and fixing hreflang across separate stores.
If you need advice with the SEO side, feel free to get in touch.