Multi-Currency Shopify Store — Case Study
Just like in my last story:
I’m trying here to share some insights about how I help my clients make better decisions for them and for their businesses.
This time, a client came to us with a very typical request: ONE Shopify Store for THREE Markets. Multi-Currency: Shopify Achilles’ heel. There are many solutions one can use, but my strategy is to listen first and then see what is the best fit for each client. Because each business is only like itself and off the shelf solutions don’t always solve a problem without creating a new one.
This was the request from our client (let’s call him Paul):
- The customer goes to store and sees pop up to choose location (Denmark, Thailand, Rest of the World)
- The store looks the same everywhere but each location has its own currency AND some details should change automatically as well (product, price ( currency)/ taxes, social media links, contact details). Language is always English, so no needs to worry about that.
The idea seems good, but after taking a second look, I spot some potential issues. Lay back and check my answer to Paul.
Hi Paul,
Thank you very much for all the info. I’d like to firstly focus on the solution you found to unify your 3 storefronts under one website [the other request done by the client is simple and not relevant to this story]. I believe that maybe there is a better and cheaper solution for you.
If we do as you ask, we’ll need to pay for an app or at least some API for IP geolocation (something like https://apps.shopify.com/geolizr) to automatically change the content based on the location of the client. If you prefer to have the pop up for the client to choose their region you don’t need it, but you’re putting one more barrier for the customer to click through which is not the most user friendly thing to do.
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The main problem we need to solve is the multi-currency. If you have a store in Shopify, you can use an app or script to convert the currency based on the location or customer’s choice, but those conversions will only work until the checkout. Once the customer is ready to buy, they’ll need to pay in the currency you have in your Shopify settings. If we would be speaking of USD and EUR alone, maybe it would be ok to simply add a message in cart warning customers about this change. That’s the common practice and it works fairly well. However, between THB [Thailand currency] and EUR customers, the block would be too big in my opinion and they would not complete the purchase.
Conclusion: you’ll spend money in our work to make things work as you planned and the results for your customers may be poor anyway 😞
What I suggest:
Open 3 Shopify accounts. The costs won’t be higher than the ones you’ll need to set up and mantain one unified store. At the same time, by having 3 different stores, you can have different payment and shipping methods specifically for each market: Thailand and Denmark customers buy online in very different ways. You can still have the currency dropdown, but once they choose their currency they would actually move to another website which will look exactly the same, but would be perfectly fit for them in terms of the variable content you described (product, price ( currency)/ taxes, social media links, contact details).
To make this work well, we just need to solve the potential issues around inventory. How are you dealing with that? If you have one warehouse per market, that’s great, because you could manage them individually. If you’re drop shipping, there’s nothing to solve as well. Now, if you have one warehouse for the 3 markets, this will require us to use some app or system to have all the stock info centralised and connected with the 3 Shopify stores. Fortunately, there are many apps to help us with that and we can complete that setup pretty quickly.
Having 3 separate stores, can also allow you to manage everything more rigorously, by having one person / team responsible for each one. It will be easier to analyse your results and adapt each store to the customers’ needs. If you have only one store, every time you’ll need to make a specific change to one market you’ll depend on us or another experts to code it for you, in order to avoid showing the wrong content to the wrong audience.
Let me know what you think about all this.
Thanks,
D.
I’m David. Shopify Expert 😎 If you want to get one hour free consultation to figure out how I can help you, feel free to contact me:
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