Shopify Markets Explained: Selling Into the US and Beyond From Canada (2026)

01. What Shopify Markets Actually Is

Shopify Markets lets you group your customers by country or region into distinct "markets," each with its own currency, storefront language, domain or subdomain, and pricing rules, all running on the single Shopify backend you already use. A US market can show USD pricing on a us.yourstore.com subdomain while your Canadian storefront keeps CAD pricing on your existing domain, and both draw from the same product catalog and the same admin.

This is a meaningfully different approach from the workaround most smaller merchants used for years: a currency-converter app bolted onto a single-market store, or a second Shopify store entirely, duplicating products, inventory, and content across two admins that inevitably drift out of sync. Markets is built into every plan, including Basic, so it is not a Plus-only capability the way B2B once was.

Why it matters: the barrier to presenting your store correctly to a US or international buyer used to be a real development project. Now it is a settings-panel task, which changes who can reasonably justify testing a new market before committing to it.

02. Markets vs. Markets Pro

The most common confusion is treating Markets and Markets Pro as the same thing at different price points. They solve different problems, and knowing which one you actually need first avoids paying for automation you are not ready to use.

Eligibility and exact per-transaction pricing for Markets Pro depend on your Shopify plan, your payment setup, and which countries are currently supported, so confirm current terms in your Shopify admin before budgeting around it. The practical decision point is volume: a merchant shipping a handful of US orders a month rarely needs Markets Pro's automation yet, while a wholesaler doing meaningful, recurring cross-border volume usually finds the fee worth paying to remove duty surprises at the door.

Why it matters: starting with base Markets lets you validate that a new country actually converts before paying for merchant-of-record automation you may not need yet, which protects margin during the test phase of an expansion.

03. Currency, Duty, and Tax: What Gets Calculated for You

Base Shopify Markets converts and displays your prices in the local currency of each market, and lets you set rounding rules so a converted price lands on a clean number instead of an awkward decimal. What it does not do on its own is calculate what a shipment will actually cost the buyer once it crosses a border, duties, import taxes, and brokerage fees, none of which show up in the storefront price without Markets Pro.

Without Markets Pro, a Canadian merchant shipping to the US is generally selling delivered duty unpaid, meaning the customer or a courier collects duties and taxes separately, often at the door, as a surprise on top of the price they already paid. That surprise is a well-documented cause of refused deliveries and chargebacks, and it is a different problem from the tariff and landed-cost strategy covered in our cross-border ecommerce and tariffs guide. That guide covers the trade-policy and cost side, what tariffs currently apply and how to protect margin against them. This section is about what the platform actually calculates at checkout, which is the mechanism that either absorbs or exposes that cost to your buyer.

Markets Pro's duty and tax calculation, where eligible, shows the buyer one landed price at checkout and handles the customs paperwork and remittance behind it, which is the delivered duty paid model most established cross-border retailers use to avoid door-side surprises entirely.

Why it matters: the checkout price a US buyer sees on your store today is very likely incomplete if you have not configured duty handling, and that gap between quoted and actual cost is one of the more fixable sources of abandoned international carts.

04. Setting Up Your First International Market

Adding a market is a settings-panel task, but the decisions around pricing and structure deserve real attention before you launch it to customers.

1. 1. Confirm the market is worth building. Pull existing orders, abandoned checkouts, and traffic by country from your analytics before picking your first market. The US is the obvious first move for most Canadian manufacturers, but let your own data confirm it.
2. 2. Add the market in Settings, then Markets. Select the country or region, and Shopify creates the market shell for you to configure.
3. 3. Set currency and rounding rules. Decide whether prices convert automatically or get manually adjusted, and set rounding so converted prices land on clean, deliberate numbers rather than odd decimals.
4. 4. Choose your domain structure. A subdirectory, subdomain, or separate top-level domain for the new market each carry different SEO and brand-perception trade-offs, and this decision is harder to reverse later than the others on this list.
5. 5. Localize pricing, not just currency. A straight currency conversion often lands on prices that feel wrong for that market. Adjust to competitive, round price points the way you would for your home market instead of accepting whatever the exchange rate produces.
6. 6. Test the full checkout with a real international address. Confirm shipping rates, tax display, and duty handling, if using Markets Pro, all behave as expected before announcing the new market publicly.

Why it matters: most of the setup is reversible except the domain structure decision, so getting that one right the first time avoids a costly redo once the new market has SEO history and customer bookmarks pointing at it.

05. Market-Specific Catalogs and Wholesale Pricing

For manufacturers and wholesalers, Markets is not only a DTC currency tool. It works directly with native B2B company accounts, so a specific catalog and price list can be assigned to a market rather than to a broad customer segment. A US distributor logging in sees US dollar wholesale pricing and terms built for that market, while a Canadian retailer sees Canadian dollar pricing and terms, from the same product catalog and the same Shopify admin.

This matters more than it sounds, because export pricing for wholesale accounts has traditionally lived in a spreadsheet a sales rep maintains by hand, disconnected from the storefront and prone to going stale. Building it into Markets and native B2B catalogs, covered in more depth in our Shopify B2B features guide, keeps export pricing current automatically as your standard catalog changes, and it no longer requires Shopify Plus to set up on a standard plan.

Why it matters: a manufacturer expanding wholesale into the US gets the same benefit DTC brands get from Markets, one accurate, current price list per market, without maintaining a second spreadsheet or a second store for export accounts.

06. How This Fits With Tariffs, Bill 96, and Buy Canadian

Shopify Markets comes up in three other conversations happening on Canadian storefronts right now, and it is worth being precise about which one this guide covers, since Markets is the shared infrastructure behind all three but the actual decisions in each case are different.

• Tariffs and landed cost. Our cross-border tariffs guide covers the trade-policy and margin-protection side of shipping to the US. This guide covers the platform setup that presents pricing and duties correctly once you have decided how to absorb or pass on that cost.
• Quebec's Bill 96. Our Bill 96 compliance guide uses Markets to build a French-language storefront for Quebec, an inbound, domestic compliance use case. This guide is about outbound expansion into new countries and currencies, a different market entirely, though the same Markets infrastructure supports both.
• Buy Canadian positioning. Our Buy Canadian marketing playbook covers brand positioning for Canadian buyers. A well-run US market under Markets does not conflict with that positioning domestically, since each market presents your brand appropriately to its own audience rather than diluting either one.

Why it matters: merchants who have already touched Markets for Bill 96 or tariff mitigation often assume they have covered the international expansion question too. Usually they have only covered the specific slice that prompted the project, and the growth opportunity in a properly localized second market is still sitting on the table.

07. What This Means for Atlantic Canadian Exporters

Atlantic Canadian manufacturers and wholesalers have a natural first expansion market sitting right across the border, and proximity to the US Northeast is a real logistics advantage that a lot of national competitors do not have. What has historically been missing is not demand, it is a storefront that presents pricing, currency, and duties correctly enough to convert that demand instead of losing it at checkout.

A manufacturer already running Shopify for its domestic business can add a US market this month, on its current plan, without a platform upgrade or a rebuild. The remaining work is the pricing and structure decisions in section four, and for wholesale accounts specifically, the export catalog work in section five, not a large development project.

Why it matters: the businesses best positioned to benefit from Shopify Markets right now are the small and mid-size Canadian exporters who were priced out of a proper multi-country setup before, not the larger accounts that already built custom international storefronts years ago.

08. Key Takeaways

• Shopify Markets is a free, built-in feature on every plan, including Basic, that lets one store serve multiple countries with local currency, pricing, and domains.
• Shopify Markets Pro is a separate, paid add-on that calculates duties and import taxes at checkout and acts as merchant of record. Add it once cross-border volume justifies the automation, not on day one.
• Without Markets Pro, cross-border orders generally ship delivered duty unpaid, meaning the buyer can face a surprise cost at delivery that Markets alone does not prevent.
• Markets works with native B2B company accounts, so wholesale price lists can be assigned per market, giving US distributors accurate export pricing from the same catalog Canadian accounts use.
• Markets is the shared infrastructure behind Bill 96 compliance, tariff-era pricing, and international expansion, but each of those is a different project with a different goal.
• Atlantic Canadian manufacturers already running Shopify domestically can typically add a US market on their current plan, without a platform upgrade, this month.

09. Frequently Asked Questions