The Power of Localization in Shopify

Expand your Shopify business globally with localization. Internationalization scales your brand across countries, while localization tailors your Shopify store to new markets. Translate content, adapt to local culture, and customize the customer journey for success.

The Power of Localization in Shopify

Expanding your online business globally offers immense opportunities. Just with a few clicks and spending some time, you can make your products available in a specific country. However, it's not as simple as it seems. Internationalization alone isn't enough to increase your global sales; true success lies in localization.

When it comes to expanding your online business, understanding the differences between internationalization and localization is crucial. Internationalization serves as a common strategy for D2C brands looking to scale by targeting new countries and customers, especially when local market efficiencies are stagnant.

On the other hand, localization is the key to making your store accessible and appealing to locals in new markets. This comprehensive process includes translating content, adapting it to the local culture, adjusting layouts for different languages, establishing international domains, and customizing every step of the customer journey. By prioritizing localization, you can create a tailored experience that resonates with customers in your target markets.

You can’t get your brand's full market share potential without localising your shopping experience. Products, content, logistics, currency and pricing, shouldn’t be the same for all your customers worldwide. 

In this article, we will explore how to enhance your Shopify Internationalization strategy. You'll gain insights on when and how to effectively achieve localization in your Shopify store, enabling you to sell like a native. Let's see it!

Table of contents

Some Striking Stats About Localization

Do you still have doubts about the advantages of localization? Allow us to present compelling statistics that will undoubtedly convince you to prioritize its implementation:

  1. 92% of international visitors want to browse and buy in their own currency and prices. (Source: Shopify)
  2. Localising a store can increase its visibility in search engines by up to 30%. (Source: Shopify)
  3. Localising a store can lead to a 30% increase in conversion rates. (Source: Common Sense Advisory)
  4. Localising a store can increase its average order value by 20%. (Source: Common Sense Advisory)

Top Benefits of Localizing Your Shopify Store

But let’s dive a bit deeper into the exciting possibilities behind localization and explore how it can reshape the way your Shopify store performs in global markets. By tailoring the shopping experience to each audience, you can improve conversion rates, reduce operational inefficiencies, strengthen your pricing strategy, and unlock new sources of sustainable growth. When done well, localization doesn’t just enhance your store; it becomes a powerful lever to scale your business and attract high-intent international traffic.

Increasing International Conversion Rates

A well-executed localized experience strategy can significantly enhance conversions. It involves more than just language; it encompasses tailoring the message to resonate with the target audience. By adapting the message to cultural nuances, you can further bolster your conversion rate.

For instance, consider a scenario where you have a French customer. By showcasing content relevant to their home country in French, such as localized calendar events, product images, and pricing, you can instill a sense of trust and familiarity. This localization effort creates an impression that they are purchasing from a local brand, enabling your business to compete effectively with local competitors and ultimately elevate your conversion rate in that specific country.

Scale Your Business

Scaling your business internationally requires more than simply opening your store to new markets. To grow sustainably, you need to optimize the way your operations, pricing, and customer experience adapt to each region. Localization supports this by helping you reduce operational friction, optimize pricing for each market, and strengthen the value of every customer you acquire. When your store adapts intelligently to different regions, you create a business model that is easier to expand, more cost-effective, and better positioned for long-term, predictable growth.

Decrease your Costs

A key part of scaling internationally is understanding that demand behaves differently from one market to another. The fact that a product underperforms in one region doesn’t make it a weak product; often it simply means it’s being shown to the wrong audience, at the wrong time, or with the wrong message.

When brands analyze performance by market and adapt their assortment, pricing, and storytelling accordingly, they unlock far more control over how inventory moves. This is not just about “local preferences”, it’s about making smarter, data-driven decisions that reduce carrying costs, prevent stockouts in high-demand regions, and avoid waste in others.

Take a simple example: a shirt that sells poorly in France might be trending in the US. Without market-level insight, that product becomes excess inventory. With it, the brand can reallocate stock, adjust messaging, or reposition pricing, turning a liability into revenue.

And as you’ll see below, even basic market differences can completely change how a product performs.

Factor

Market A

Market B

Taxes

21%

8%

Shipping costs

High

Low

Competition

Strong

Moderate

This is what true localization enables: the ability to match the right product with the right market at the right moment. And that’s one of the most powerful levers for scaling efficiently and profitably across borders.

Adapt your Prices

Adapting your prices is one of the most effective ways to grow sustainably across markets. While keeping a single global price may feel simpler, it often ignores how differently each market behaves. Competition, taxes, shipping costs, customer expectations, and even perceived product value vary widely from one country to another.

When every market operates under its own economic dynamics, uniform pricing can erode your margins in some regions while making you uncompetitive in others. By embracing a localized experience, merchants can set different prices for each market they serve, enabling them to preserve or even enhance their unit margin.

This flexibility allows brands to stay profitable where operational costs are higher, remain attractive where competition is stronger, and tap into higher willingness-to-pay where it exists.

Before: one global price

Lower margin in Germany, overpriced in Italy

After: market-adjusted pricing

Stable margins + higher competitiveness

Grow your Recurring Rate

Acquiring a new buyer can cost anywhere from 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. By offering a localized experience, you can foster loyalty and enhance the lifetime value of your customers.

For instance, when our aforementioned French customer encounters any issues or has post-purchase questions, providing support in their native language makes them appreciative, ultimately elevating their satisfaction levels.

As you enhance customer loyalty, you'll experience increased sales and benefit from positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

Boost your cross-border traffic

Driving traffic from new countries requires more than simply making your store accessible; it demands being discoverable and relevant in each market. When you tailor your content, structure, and messaging to local behaviors, you increase your chances of showing up where international customers actually search and engage. From improving how your store ranks abroad to making your brand resonate on the channels people use every day, the right localization strategy helps you attract higher-intent visitors and turn cross-border visibility into real growth.

And if you’re looking for a clear, actionable path to adapt both your website and your marketing strategy for real international growth, you’ll find everything you need in this article.

SEO

Search engines are more likely to show your store to users who search in their language. Therefore, as more information we provide to search crawlers, the better our search engine optimisation will be. 

When you set up international experiences, you can add a unique web address or URL for each market where you want to offer a localised shopping experience. So if you’re opening a cross-sale market in France, you can create a subfolder to host this experience, such as “mystore.com/fr-fr”. As Google or another feed crawler will also be able to read these localised versions of your pages, your website rank will increase for users of this country.

Social media

Customers are more likely to trust a store tailored to their location and language. With these new localised experiences, you can create a new social media account for those markets. In each of these new accounts, you can attach your unique URL of those countries, so customers go directly to their home country experience.

Furthermore, your paid media ads specialists can create localised campaigns using these links. It will improve the customer experience and give you more insights into your ad campaigns based on their country of origin.

Is Your Brand Prepared to Embark on Cross-Border Localization?

Prior to embarking on the localization of shopping experiences, it is essential to assess your business readiness. Are you prepared to venture into new cross-border experiences? It's important to consider the operational and time commitments each new experience will demand from your team. Therefore, it is crucial to carefully evaluate this decision before proceeding. 

Now, let's explore the key metrics that can help you determine your readiness. You should aim to meet at least one of the following criteria:

Obviously, it is possible to commence localizing shopping experiences earlier on, but it is important to bear in mind that, at this stage, there is still significant work to be done within your primary market.

With 10,000+ active installations, Orbe is the best geolocation app for Shopify, trusted by top brands like Nike Strength, Timex, Victoria Beckham, FC Barcelona, and Liquid Death.

Try the app for free in the Shopify App Store.

Try Orbe now

FAQs

Now that you are ready to start localizing shopping experiences on Shopify and have determined your target localization areas, you must know there are two different approaches to initiate localization efforts:

  1. Using Shopify Markets.
  2. Create different Shopify Expansion Stores for each of these markets. 

Both options allow you to tailor the content and pricing for each local experience. However, each of them has its advantages and disadvantages, and many brands decide to mix both in their localization strategy. 

If you want to learn more about this, we suggest reading this article to find out the differences between these two approaches (and understand when each one makes the most sense for your business).

So, you have invested a large amount of money in localizing shopping experiences and have different products, prices, currencies, languages, and even landing pages for different markets. At this point, you wonder how you can ensure your customers land in the right place.

That's where Orbe comes in. Orbe redirects your customers to the right shopping experience based on their location and preferences and boosts your international conversion rate. It automatically integrates with your Shopify Markets and connects multiple expansion stores to recommend to your customers the version of your store that corresponds to their IP address and browser language. It offers customization options, is SEO-friendly, compliant with data protection laws, and maintains attribution parameters of your marketing campaign during redirects.

In addition to Orbe, there are other geolocation Shopify apps available. If you're interested in comparing their features and understanding how they work, we invite you to continue reading our blog article dedicated to this topic. It provides a detailed comparison that will help you make an informed choice.

In the Shopify App Store, you can explore a variety of apps designed to facilitate the translation of your store into multiple languages. However, it's important to note that not all of these apps are compatible with Shopify Markets.

To make the process easier for you, we recommend utilizing Translate & Adapt, a native app developed specifically for Shopify. Additionally, you can also consider using Langify or Transcy, both of which are reliable options for translating your store effectively.

If you have multiple Shopify Stores, you can continue managing your products and prices conveniently through the main menu of your Shopify Store, just as you have always done.

For Shopify Markets users, you have the flexibility to personalize your products and prices for each available market directly from the Markets settings.

In addition to the standard payment methods available in each store, such as Shopify Payments for credit card payments, Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Paypal Express, we strongly recommend considering the inclusion of other local payment methods. These local methods not only enhance trust but also cater to the preferences of the local customers, thereby boosting your conversion rates in those countries.

Within Shopify Markets, you have the ability to enable multiple shipping methods and collect specific taxes and duties for each market. For more detailed information on these features, we recommend referring to the Shopify Help Center.