How to sell internationally on Shopify: Guide for Global eCommerce Success

Overview

Many consumer goods brands have this problem:

• They have to charge different prices in different country markets
• Their products are presented internationally in different languages
• They must show online such complex catalogs, and possibly sell online, without putting at risk their off-line distribution nor confusing consumers which connect from different countries.

Besides prices, some catalog items, and languages, everything else is normally shared: barcodes, photos, SKU codes, all media.

To conclude the complexity, if there is an e-commerce platform connected to these websites, orders are normally fulfilled from different warehouses, and the international e-commerce system you build must therefore send orders to the correct warehouse.

How to solve online international price and language differentiation?

Can you sell internationally on Shopify

Selling multichannel has become the new normal, especially for retailers who want to scale their business, seizing the opportunities offered by multiple digital markets. In this new stage of retailing, marketplaces and eCommerce platforms play a leading role, fostering sellers’ business profitability, getting them access to a broad customer base, and boosting their product offer exposure.

For many sellers, marketplaces have been the starting point in their online retailing experience, but for sellers who want to boost earnings and brand awareness, creating a branded e-store on Shopify is the next step to take.

Convert your Shopify local store into an international one

Shopify is an international ecommerce platforms, with it you can start selling internationally and scale your business. But how to do so? Follow these 6 easy hints to convert your Shopify local store into an international one:

• Create one Shopify store dedicated to your first country. This first online store will be your master store, the one in which you first upload or create your content, such as product descriptions, product codes such as SKU codes and GTINs, product media such as pictures.
• Create a second Shopify store online store for your second geography. A typical set-up is Store-1 (master) for your largest market, for instance, your “home” market, and Store-2 (called slave) for the Rest-of-the world.
  Note that you can design the schema as you need better.
  Example: have the master store serving not your largest market, but your most complex market or the market in which you need the highest level of control or precision.
• Create a subdomain under your main domain name and point it to the second store. For instance, have your www.brandname.com domain pointing to your main / master e-commerce site, and create a fr.brandname.com to serve the French market and have it pointing to your second / slave e-commerce website.
• Install on both stores an IP-recognition app, which will filter traffic coming from specific countries. Set the IP-recognition app so that it will direct the traffic to the correct online store.
• Upload your content in your first store but NOT YET in your second store.
• Migrate in bulk and sync listings across your two stores. You can do it with Nembol: connect both stores to Nembol. Nembol will take care of moving your catalog from your master Shopify online store to your slave e-commerce store in the blink of an eye, saving you countless hours. Selling across countries with Shopify has never been so easy! Moreover, you can setup Nembol to provide a host of additional finer connecting functions, which will make your life even easier.

Selling internationally on Shopify

Once you connected Nembol to your first Shopify store, you can import products from it into Nembol, then list these same products, all of them or subsets of them, into your second “rest of the world” e-commerce shop. Follow these steps.

How to migrate products from one online store to another

1. Connect Nembol to your Shopify-1.
   Trim the “import from” settings as to import in Nembol the products you wish (the import filtering is available during the free trial, and later only to advanced Nembol plans).
2. Click “Import”. You’ll soon see the products you had in your Shopify 1, appearing in your Nembol account. Refresh every few minutes to see the proceedings.
3. Connect Nembol to your Shopify-2
4. Remember to trim the “List to” settings in Nembol, because this second online store will be your listing destination. In the “List to” settings:
   — You can set-up Nembol to list on specific collections or categories each bulk of products you’re going to list
   — You can define pricing rules so that all your prices will be changed by a specific %. After such a change, Nembol will round your prices to the nearest .99, to avoid ugly broken figures.
   — If you don’t have super-firm price-lists, you may well use the above-described Nembol price ruling function to adapt the prices of Store-2 compared to the prices on Store-1.
5. Select a handful of test products, and click “Publish” from the Actions menu in Nembol. We always advise testing with a few products to start with.
6. Note that you can do all of the above without spending a cent, by using Shopify free trial, as well as Nembol 14-day free trial, during which you can test all of our functions and features.
7. Check the results of your listing on your “second” store. It’ll take just a few seconds for Nembol to populate it with your products.

How to manage Shopify international stores on Nembol

How to have differentiated prices on two stores

If you have different prices, you may either use the “Price adjust” setting in Nembol (see Picture 1 below), in the “List to” setting: set it to a positive or negative percentage.

Otherwise, if you prefer having a specific price, turn Off the “Edit from Nembol” function (see Picture 2) and edit prices manually in your Shopify Store 2.

The latter solution of course is considerably less comfortable compared to using price-rules, because you have to do it manually at the outset and later every time you need a change.

How to have differentiated content (e.g. language)

Differentiated content may be different languages in the most common case.

You can manage different languages by adding to your Store two a multi-lingual app. In this case, your main store, (or Store-1) will lead the main description in the main language to the Store-2, and you will have to equip the latter with one of many available multi-lingual apps.

This app will take care of translations, and of HTML language switches. In this scenario. you are better served by keeping the “Edit from Nembol” setting ON in your Store 2 settings, because each change you make in Nembol will be transferred to your Store two, and the multi-lingual app (which is independent from Nembol) will take care of updating the translations.

Working with Shopify as an e-commerce platform, you may also want to keep the “Edit listings from Shopify” setting ON, so that you’ll be able to edit products in your Master Shopify store and have such edits pushed via Nembol to your Slave Shopify store.

Please note that you cannot have content edits (such as product titles or descriptions) automatically pushed to your Store-2, without also having prices synced. So the latter configuration works best when you can set automated price-rules between your two international stores.

If you have different inventory between your “master” and “secondary” stores

If you use the same warehouse for the two stores, set in Nembol “Quantity sync from Shopify” ON, so that Nembol will keep your inventory in sync across the two and hence towards the same warehouse.

If, otherwise, you will fulfill from two separated facilities with separated inventory, turn “Quantity sync from Shopify” OFF. This way, the two inventories will not influence one another, after the first listing.

How to sync orders to the same facility

If you are actually shipping from the same warehouse, or you are using the same order management team to fulfill both Master and Slave Shopify stores, you may finally choose to have orders transferred in just one of the two Shopify stores. This will be taken care of by Nembol.

To transfer orders, Nembol needs the ordered product to actually exist in both stores, and it will generate a new order in your chosen “order management” Shopify store. The new order will have the product as it is in the chosen Shopify store. The “Transfer orders to Shopify” function is still in Beta and serves uniquely the need to ease order management by allowing a unique order fulfillment process to be applied to both Shopify Store 1 and Store 2. More will come on this function.

Now that you are set-up with the basic workings, the question arises naturally: what happens in season two, when I must add new products to both my Shopify Master store and my Slave store?

Shopify international shipping

As an international ecommerce platforms, Shopify has made it easy for merchants to sell their products globally by providing a range of international shipping options.

With Shopify’s built-in shipping settings, merchants can easily set up their shipping rates and delivery options for different countries and regions. Additionally, Shopify offers a variety of integrated shipping carriers and apps, which allow merchants to simplify their shipping processes and automate tasks such as printing labels and tracking packages.

With these tools, merchants can expand their customer base by offering reliable and cost-effective shipping options to customers all around the world, helping to grow their businesses and increase sales.

How to add more products from your main store to a secondary store

When the new season comes, or maybe a new batch of products gets delivered, you may have the need to add more products from your “master” to your “slave” stores. Let’s see how to do it.

1. Add products to your main Shopify store
2. Double-check the settings, as described in the previous paragraph, given potentially updated needs of your business.
3. Click “Import” from your Master store, in Nembol. Nembol will import exclusively products that are not already in Nembol. Hence the new season products (as well as products that you may have deleted from Nembol in the meantime).
4. Use Nembol Product page filters to select only products which are in “Imported” status (see Picture 3 below)
5. Select a few of them as a test, and later up to 200 per batch, and list them on your Shopify-2. Using the Publish function from the Actions menu.

You are now done. If you correctly set your settings as in the previous paragraph, your two stores will serve your international audience as needed.

Conclusions

After reading this article, you now know how to set up a set of two Shopify stores to start selling across countries, with a choice of:

• Dedicated international prices
• Dedicated language content
• Dedicated fulfillment warehouse
• Centralized order management in one of the two stores interface

Please do not hesitate to try Nembol, free for up to 14-days or till you upgrade to a Premium Plan, and please leave us a comment in the box below or chat with us in-app if you need any further information or have any suggestions.

Dear reader, please have a wonderful rest of the day, or night.