Shopify Advances Its Cross-Border Offerings with Markets Pro and Translate and Adapt

Lost in the Amazon daze of this week was Shopify's cross-border enhancements. Why is Shopify investing so much in cross-border? Because of their ambitions to expand -- mostly in EMEA but also APAC.

North America is about 71% by 2021 revenue [2021 annual report] but 2019 it was 74%. What's growing faster? EMEA. Europe as of 2021 revs is 17%. An area where Global-E is strong. More on this later. If you go by merchant count, the North America share is much less, and this year could be less than 50% even (it was 55% in 2021 numbers).

For the average US seller, cross-border is not a huge opportunity - often less than 5%. Cross-border for the European or Asian seller could represent 30-60% of sales on the other hand.

That is an extremely important component of your business that needs to be dialed in. If Shopify can make it easier, then they can make more headway against incumbent platforms in these markets.

Shopify Markets Pro is cross-border software that is essentially a white-label version of Global-E. This moment has been coming for some time as Global-E was already kind of the preferred provider for Shopify in this segment.

Markets Pro provides a DDP-based merchant of record model that plugs into your Shopify store. Buyers check out in local currency with local payment methods. Sellers get paid in their home currency.

I watched the videos and looks like you need to apply for it at the moment. Appears there are options for printing your own labels, as well as using a logistics partner. Likely it's their logistics partner (Global-E)

Shopify Translate and Adapt allows automatic translation of your store in up to 2 languages, which looks like it's being powered by Google. That will be enough for a lot of people, even though you could do this on your own, this will reduce some of the friction.

If you need to override a translation, you are able to do that at the product-level as well.

Shopify's international growth is one of those good signs for the company, and from an expansion point of view, there is a lot of room to run there.