Shopify Markets for Australian Stores: Selling Overseas

Quick answer: In Shopify Markets you create one market for each audience (Australia, New Zealand, the United States), turn on that market’s currency, set prices with a catalogue adjustment or fixed prices, and give each market its own subfolder so Shopify can generate the hreflang tags for you. Shopify’s Managed Markets option, where Global-e is the merchant of record and handles tax registration, is documented for merchants based in the continental US and selected stores in Canada and the UK as at 31 October 2026, so an Australian store is its own seller of record and should get tax advice before selling to the US or New Zealand. The upside of a US market is a far larger audience, not a proven cheaper click: no primary source says US traffic costs less, so test it with a capped budget and judge it on profit per order.

If you run a Shopify store in Australia, you have probably wondered about selling to the US or New Zealand. Your home audience is about 28 million people (the Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 27.9 million at 31 March 2026). A second country widens the audience you can sell to.

Shopify Markets is the part of Shopify that lets one store sell to several countries, each with its own currency, prices, products, domain structure and tax display. Switching it on is quick; working out what it does to your margin, tax position and search visibility takes longer.

The results for “shopify markets australia” are mostly vendor blogs, app listings and community threads, so I built this guide from Shopify’s Help Center and Google’s documentation, and I say where a source does not answer the question. Shopify’s help pages change, so every dated statement is as at 31 October 2026. Check the live page before acting on anything involving money or tax. This is general information, not tax or legal advice.

What Shopify Markets actually is

A market is a group of customers that Shopify treats differently from the rest. Shopify’s Help Center says a market is defined by conditions that decide who sees it and customisations that change what they see. For a country market, the condition is the customer’s location. Other types exist for wholesale (B2B), retail and sales channels, but the cross-border type is this guide’s subject.

A market inherits your store’s defaults until you add a customisation, and removing one returns the market to the inherited value. Three setup facts from Shopify’s help pages are worth knowing early:

• Creating regional markets is free on all plans, with no limit on the number of country or region markets.
• A market can only be activated for countries where you have shipping rates. Customers from countries outside every active market can browse but cannot check out.
• Your store comes with a domestic market (your home country) and an international market that is inactive by default. Your backup region starts as your home country.

The backup region matters more than it sounds. It decides what a visitor from an unmatched country sees, and it is where your x-default hreflang tag points. Shopify notes that businesses whose regional teams run local operations independently may prefer separate stores. For a founder-led brand with one inventory, one store is usually simpler (my view).

Before you open the admin: five questions

Answer these first:

1. Is there evidence of demand? In Search Console’s Performance report, group by Countries and look at your existing New Zealand and US impressions and clicks. Then check where your current orders ship.
2. Can you ship there at a cost the customer will accept? Shopify will not activate a market without shipping rates for every country in it. Get a carrier quote for a typical parcel first.
3. Who pays the duty? This is the biggest change for Australian stores selling to the US. More on it below.
4. Does the order still make money? Work out contribution per order after product cost, shipping, duty and fees, before you look at what traffic costs. There is an illustrative example later.
5. Who handles returns and support? Decide the returns policy for each market before launch, including who pays return shipping.

If question 3 or 4 fails, stop. A market you cannot afford to serve is not an expansion.

Standard Markets versus Managed Markets: who carries the tax risk

In standard Markets (Shopify’s international sales tools) you stay the seller. Shopify’s Managed Markets adds a merchant of record, the legal entity responsible for selling to the customer, and that role is taken by Global-e. You will still see Managed Markets called “Markets Pro” in older articles: Shopify’s changelog of 2 July 2024 says the tool formerly known as Markets Pro was renamed from 24 June 2024.

Here is how Shopify describes the difference, from its Managed Markets help pages and its comparison post of 25 September 2026:

The last row is the one that matters. Shopify’s help pages say Managed Markets is available to merchants based in the continental United States and to certain stores in Canada and the UK. Australia is not on that list as at 31 October 2026. Check your own admin, because Shopify has widened availability before (its changelog of 15 July 2026 added Canada and the UK).

So the working assumption for an Australian store is that you are the merchant of record. Shopify’s comparison says that under standard Markets you are responsible for registering for and remitting taxes, and its duties and taxes settings say that to collect sales tax for a market you must first enter a tax registration for the regions it includes.

What that means for you is a question for your accountant, not for me or a Shopify help page. Put these to them before you activate a US or New Zealand market:

• Do I need to register for any tax in the destination, and from what level of sales?
• How are overseas sales treated for GST in Australia? (Our post on GST on overseas sales for Australian Shopify stores covers the Australian side.)
• Should prices show tax inclusive or exclusive in each market, and how do duties affect my reporting?

Shopify’s dynamic tax display helps with the display side. It includes the local tax rate in storefront prices only for countries on its list. Australia and New Zealand are on it. The United States is not, so US prices display without tax and any sales tax is added at checkout.

Duties: the US changed in 2025

For years, low-value parcels into the US could arrive duty free under a rule called de minimis. Shopify’s help page on customs fees says that from 29 August 2025 de minimis no longer applies to shipments into the United States, and US Customs and Border Protection’s release of 24 June 2026 says its regulations indefinitely suspend duty-free de minimis treatment for imports valued at $800 or less.

So a typical US parcel is no longer assumed to arrive duty free. What you pay depends on classification, country of origin and the tariff in force, which I cannot tell you for your range. Shopify’s duties settings say what to prepare:

• Add a Harmonised System (HS) code and a country of origin to every product. Without an HS code, Shopify estimates from the description and category, which it says might be less accurate.
• Choose how duties show: a separate line at checkout, or included in the price (you absorb them). Either way, Shopify states the figure is an estimate and actual duties charged by customs authorities might differ.

Say on your shipping and returns pages who pays duty and what happens to it on a return; our guide to shipping and returns messaging covers the wording.

Setting up AU, NZ and US markets

Work in Draft status until the last step.

1. Check the prerequisites

• Payments. Shopify says that to accept payments in more than one currency you need Shopify Payments or Adyen. Without either, customers in every market pay in your default currency.
• Shipping. Create rates for New Zealand and the United States first.

2. Decide how many markets to create

Shopify lets you group countries or create single-country markets. My suggestion: make Australia, New Zealand and the United States three separate markets, because they differ in currency, tax display, shipping cost and likely duty. Grouped countries share one set of customisations.

3. Create each market as a draft

In Markets in the admin, choose Create market, name it, set the status to Draft and add a region condition. A draft lets you preview the market before customers see it, and a market stays inactive until every country in it has shipping rates.

4. Turn on the currency

Add a currency customisation, then choose the exchange rate method:

• Automatic. Shopify says rates come from financial markets and update through the day, and the currency conversion fee is built into the displayed price.
• Manual. You set a fixed rate. Shopify says the fee is then deducted from your payout, and you must keep the rate current.

I would stay on automatic: a manual rate you forget to update is a margin leak nobody notices. Shopify’s help also says you need a country selector if you sell in local currencies, so customers can pick their country and see its currency.

5. Set prices on purpose

Conversion is a starting point, not a pricing strategy. Shopify gives you two tools through catalogues, plus rounding on the currency setting:

• A percentage adjustment on every price in the catalogue. By default it also applies to compare-at prices, and you can switch that off.
• Fixed prices that override the catalogue-wide percentage. Shopify’s example: with a 10% decrease, a product set manually to USD 2.00 is still charged USD 2.00.
• Rounding (a currency customisation per market), applied after conversion and any price adjustments, so a converted price lands on an easier-to-read number.

My suggestion for a US market: start with automatic conversion, add a percentage adjustment to cover the extra shipping and duty you expect to absorb, and set fixed prices only on a few hero products.

Do not copy your Australian price and call it done. Australian prices are normally shown including GST (Shopify’s dynamic tax display lists Australia as a region where prices include local tax), while US prices are shown without tax. Ask your accountant which price you should be converting, so a US customer is not quietly paying for an Australian tax.

6. Choose a domain structure

Shopify’s international SEO page says each market can use a subfolder, a subdomain or a separate top-level domain, and recommends subfolders for most stores because they share your main domain’s authority and need the least setup. Google’s own table of URL options lists the trade-offs: a country-specific domain gives clear geotargeting but is expensive and targets one country, while subdirectories are easy and low maintenance but harder to separate.

For Australia, New Zealand and the US, I would use subfolders: Australia on the main domain, the others on subfolders. Shopify’s older domains page says subfolders on secondary markets combine a language code with a country code (its examples are /fr-ca and /en-eu), while its current page uses /fr/ as an example, so check what your admin offers rather than assume the path.

Two traps. Deactivating a market that uses subfolders breaks those URLs, so Shopify recommends redirects. And subfolders hang off your primary domain, so changing that domain changes them too; our Shopify migration SEO checklist covers that scenario.

7. Handle language and content

All three markets read English, so there is no translation job, but Shopify’s Translate & Adapt app can create market-specific content, such as adapted product descriptions or legal text, even for regions that share a language. My suggestion, not a Shopify rule: adapt spelling, delivery times, returns terms and the shipping line in the header. Shopify’s SEO page says search engines reward unique, localised content, and my reading is that three identical English pages give Google little reason to treat them as anything but near-copies.

8. Configure duties, taxes and selectors

Set the tax display for each market as above. Turn on duty collection for the US market if you want customers to see duty at checkout, with HS codes in place. Make sure the theme shows a country selector: Shopify recommends selectors even with automatic redirection, because IP-based location can be wrong for customers on VPNs or travelling.

On redirects, Shopify’s built-in redirection uses IP address and browser language, applies to the first page a customer visits, and ignores search engine crawlers. Google’s multi-regional guidance advises against automatically redirecting users by assumed language, because it can stop users and search engines seeing every version, and suggests links to other versions instead. Shopify’s crawler exclusion covers the crawling side; a visible selector covers the human side.

9. Test, then switch to Active

From a real device, check the market URL, currency, tax display, prices (including fixed ones), shipping rates and any duty line at checkout, and that your policies say what the customer needs to know about duty and returns. Then make the market Active and watch the first orders.

What changes for pricing, currency and fees

The conversion fee. Shopify says a currency conversion fee applies when a customer’s currency differs from your Shopify Payments payout currency. For stores in Australia and New Zealand, among other regions, the listed rate is 2% (1.5% for US stores). With automatic exchange rates the fee is built into the displayed price; with manual rates it is deducted from your payout. That is as at 31 October 2026, so confirm the rate in your admin.

Refunds. Shopify says refunds and chargebacks use the exchange rate at the time of the refund or chargeback, so the amount you pay back can rise or fall, and the conversion fee on the original sale is not refunded.

Here is why a market has to pass a margin test before a marketing test. The numbers are illustrative, not from any store, and ignore payment processing fees and the currency conversion fee (add it if you use manual rates):

The US order leaves 23 less to spend on winning the customer. If an Australian order costs 30 in advertising and a US order costs 20, the US click is a third cheaper and you still keep 17 against 30. The US campaign only breaks even if it costs 37 or less per order. Swap in your own figures and the rule holds: a market is worth testing only if its break-even advertising cost per order is above what the traffic will plausibly cost. Our posts on first-order profitability and CAC payback show how to build that calculation properly.

Hreflang and international SEO: what Shopify does and what you still check

Hreflang tells search engines which page version suits which language and region. Google lists three situations where it recommends alternate-version annotations, and one is yours: the same language targeting different countries, such as English for the US, UK and Ireland.

What Shopify does for you

According to Shopify’s international SEO page, once domains, languages and content are set:

• Hreflang tags are generated automatically for markets with a distinct domain, subdomain or subfolder, and update when market settings change. The x-default tag points to the version in your backup region’s market. Region tags appear only for markets that include the product.
• Canonical tags are set automatically, and each market’s version of a page is self-referencing. Shopify says this signals related but distinct pages for different audiences, not duplicates.
• Sitemaps are generated automatically and include all market-specific URLs with hreflang annotations.

Shopify warns that turning off automatic hreflang (Online Store, then Preferences) can negatively affect your SEO. Leave it on unless a developer who knows hreflang tells you otherwise.

The rules, so you can check the output

Google’s documentation sets the rules the tags must follow:

• Every version lists itself and every other version, and the set is the same on all of them.
• Links must be reciprocal. Google says that if two pages do not point to each other, the tags are ignored.
• A language code can stand alone (en) or take a region (en-AU). A region code on its own is invalid.
• x-default is the fallback for users who match none of your versions.
• Google says it does not use hreflang or the page’s lang attribute to detect a page’s language. Hreflang is about which version to show to whom, not a ranking boost (my reading of Google’s guidance).

For an Australian store with NZ and US subfolders, every one of those pages should carry something like this (illustrative; your domain and paths will differ):

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-AU" href="https://yourstore.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-NZ" href="https://yourstore.com/en-nz/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://yourstore.com/en-us/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://yourstore.com/" />

View the source of a home page, a collection and a product in each market and look for those lines. If a market is missing, check it is active and has its own subfolder.

The same-language problem

Australian, New Zealand and US pages in English will have very similar main content. Google’s multi-regional guidance says that where similar or duplicate same-language content sits on different URLs, you should pick a preferred version and use canonical and hreflang annotations so the right regional URL reaches searchers. Shopify gives each market page a self-referencing canonical, so (my reading) Google is left to decide which version to index if it treats them as near-duplicates. I would not override Shopify’s canonicals without a clear reason.

What you control is how different the pages really are: currency, delivery promises, returns terms and local examples. Our guides to duplicate content and canonical URLs and Crawled, currently not indexed cover near-identical pages.

Measure by country

Submit your sitemap in Search Console, then watch New Zealand and US impressions and clicks in the Performance report grouped by Countries. Nobody can promise that a new market will rank, so do not set a ranking target. The groundwork is in our Shopify SEO guide.

The US market: cheaper traffic, or just a bigger pool?

The pool is bigger. The Australian Bureau of Statistics put Australia’s population at 27,921,150 at 31 March 2026. The US Census Bureau’s population clock showed 342,984,255 on 30 October 2026, about twelve times as many people. A bigger pool is not more demand for your product.

Cheaper is not established. You often hear that US clicks are cheaper. I looked for a primary source and did not find one. What Google’s Ad Rank thresholds help does say is that thresholds are set at the time of each auction and can vary by user attributes including location (Google says they can vary country by country), by device and by search topic. That tells you costs differ between countries. It does not say which way, and the answer will differ by category. The Meta ad auction page I read gives no country cost comparison either. Treat “US traffic is cheaper” as a hypothesis to test.

Diversification is a real reason. If most of your revenue comes from one country, a second market gives you a second place to find buyers, at the price of added duty, tax, shipping, support and returns.

A fair test:

1. Fix a budget you can afford to lose, capped, with an end date set before you start.
2. Define success on profit, not cost per click, using the break-even cost per order from the example above.
3. Compare like with like. Track conversion rate, average order value, refund rate and landed margin by country beside your Australian numbers. Our post on ROAS, MER and blended CAC explains which ratios to trust.
4. Decide in advance what would make you stop.

A note on where we fit: Prism3 does not run ads or email, so I am not offering to run your US campaigns. We work on what happens after the click and on visibility that does not depend on ads: how well each market’s visitors convert, how your market URLs show up in Google, and whether your tracking is right by country. If US visitors convert at half your Australian rate, a cheaper click will not rescue it.

A launch checklist

1. Accountant’s advice taken on registration and tax display for each market.
2. Shopify Payments (or Adyen) active; shipping rates created for every country.
3. Three draft markets created; currency on, automatic rates.
4. Prices reviewed: percentage adjustment set, fixed prices on hero products only.
5. HS codes and country of origin on every product; duty display chosen; shipping and returns pages say who pays duty and return shipping.
6. Subfolders assigned, country selector visible, automatic hreflang left on and checked in the page source.
7. Sitemap submitted; Performance report grouped by country.
8. Test orders checked per market, then markets made Active one at a time.
9. A written break-even cost per order and an end date for the paid test.

Key takeaways

• Shopify Markets lets one store sell to several countries, each with its own currency, prices, domain structure and tax display. Creating regional markets is free on all plans.
• An Australian store is its own merchant of record: Shopify documents Managed Markets for the continental US and selected Canadian and UK stores as at 31 October 2026. Get tax advice before selling to the US or New Zealand.
• US de minimis is no longer assumed, so work out duty before you set US prices and add HS codes and country of origin to every product.
• Use subfolders, keep automatic hreflang on and check the tags in the page source. Hreflang is about which version to show, not a promise of rankings.
• The US has about twelve times Australia’s population, but no primary source says US ads are cheaper. Test with a capped budget and judge on profit per order.

FAQs

Is Shopify Markets free for an Australian store?

Creating regional markets is free on all Shopify plans. Costs show up elsewhere: a 2% currency conversion fee when a customer pays in a currency different from your payout currency, and an optional duty calculation fee that Shopify’s comparison of 25 September 2026 calls temporary, at 0.5% (both as at 31 October 2026). Per-market theme customisation needs the Advanced plan or higher.

Do I need a separate store or domain for New Zealand or the US?

No. Markets lets you sell to several countries from one store, and Shopify recommends subfolders for most stores, such as yourstore.com/en-us/, because they share your main domain’s authority and need the least setup.

Does Shopify add hreflang tags automatically?

Yes. Shopify generates hreflang tags for markets with their own domain, subdomain or subfolder and sets x-default to your backup region’s market. You can turn it off, but Shopify warns that can negatively affect your SEO. Check the page source rather than trusting the tags are there.

Can an Australian store use Managed Markets (Markets Pro)?

As at 31 October 2026, Shopify documents Managed Markets, formerly Markets Pro, for merchants in the continental United States and selected stores in Canada and the UK. Australia is not listed. If it appears in your admin, read the fees and responsibilities closely and ask your accountant what changes. If not, you are the merchant of record.

Will a US market make my traffic cheaper?

Not necessarily, and I found no primary source that says so. Google says its auction thresholds can vary country by country, and by device and search topic, so costs differ between markets, but not in a direction you can assume. Run a capped test and compare profit per order, including shipping, duty and fees, against your Australian numbers.

Will adding a US market get me ranking in the US?

Nobody can promise that. Hreflang tells Google which version to show to which audience, and Google says it does not use hreflang to work out a page’s language. Whether US pages rank depends on relevance, quality, links and competition.

Do I need to charge GST or US sales tax on overseas orders?

That depends on your registrations and what you sell, and it is a question for an accountant. Shopify’s tools can display tax inclusive or exclusive by market, but Shopify says you must enter a tax registration before it will collect sales tax for a market. Our GST on overseas sales guide covers the Australian side. This is not tax or legal advice.

Adding a market and want the search side checked first?

A new market means a new set of URLs for Google to find, crawl and decide what to do with. Checking how those URLs are crawled and indexed is part of the technical audit in our Shopify SEO service. If you would like a second pair of eyes before you launch, book a free 30-minute diagnostic or tell us about your store: we look at your store before we recommend anything, and we tell you honestly if SEO isn’t the right move. No pitch.