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Shopify Markets handles selling into multiple countries — currencies, pricing, and domains. The SEO work is making sure each market’s pages are discoverable and correctly attributed to their audience.

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URL structures

Shopify Markets supports: Subfolders are the right default for most stores. They keep all authority on one domain, which matters more than the marginal local signal of a ccTLD — unless you have a genuine local business presence per country.

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hreflang

hreflang tells search engines which version to serve to which audience. Shopify generates these annotations automatically for Markets. Rules that are broken often:
  • Annotations must be reciprocal. If A points to B, B must point to A. One-directional annotations are ignored.
  • Include a self-referencing annotation on every page.
  • Use x-default for the fallback version when no other matches.
  • Use correct codes — language (en), or language-region (en-GB). en-UK is not valid; the country code is GB.
Verify in Search Console → International Targeting, which reports missing return tags.

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Language versus currency

These are different problems and are frequently conflated.
  • Different currency, same language — for example UK and Australian English at different prices. These pages are near-duplicates. hreflang handles attribution; without it, they compete.
  • Different language — genuinely distinct content, far less duplication risk.
A store selling in twelve currencies but one language has twelve near-identical page sets. Correct hreflang is what prevents that becoming a duplicate content problem.

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Translation quality

Machine-translated content published without review is thin content in another language. It also damages trust with the buyers you are trying to reach. If a market matters, translate properly. If it does not yet justify that, consider serving it in the primary language with local pricing rather than publishing poor translations.

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Common failures

  • Market pages not indexed because they are unreachable — no internal links, missing from the sitemap
  • Automatic redirection by IP, which prevents crawlers from seeing other versions — offer a selector instead
  • hreflang pointing to redirecting or 404 URLs
  • Local prices in structured data not matching the market’s displayed currency