Shopify Markets and prices: why a market price moved

In Shopify, a market price is the price a customer sees and pays based on their country or region. This price starts with your product's base price and is then modified by rules you configure for each market. These rules can include automatic currency conversion, percentage adjustments, fixed prices, and price rounding (Shopify Help Center).

How does Shopify calculate prices for different markets?

Shopify uses a hierarchy of rules to determine the final price a customer sees. This system gives you the flexibility to automate pricing for some regions while having precise control over others. These rules are applied through a market's catalog.

Here are the main methods, in order of priority:

1. Fixed Prices: This is the most specific rule. You can set a fixed price for an individual product or variant within a market's catalog. This fixed price will always override any other pricing rule.
2. Percentage Price Adjustments: If no fixed price is set, Shopify checks for a percentage adjustment. You can apply a broad increase or decrease to all product prices for a specific market. This is useful for absorbing costs like international tariffs or higher shipping expenses. For instance, you could create a catalog for the United States that increases all prices by a certain percentage to account for import duties.
3. Automatic Currency Conversion: If neither a fixed price nor a percentage adjustment applies, Shopify automatically converts your store's base prices into the customer's local currency using the current market exchange rate.

What are price rounding rules and how do they affect prices?

Price rounding rules are an optional setting that automatically adjusts your converted product prices to have more familiar and stable endings (Shopify Help Center). When you sell internationally, direct currency conversion can result in prices with inconsistent endings. Applying rounding rules keeps your prices stable even when the foreign exchange rate changes.

You can enable this feature by opening a market's settings from the Markets page, clicking the market's currency, and then selecting the rounding option (Shopify Help Center). Once activated, Shopify applies a standard set of rounding rules for each currency; you cannot customize the rounding logic yourself. This feature helps maintain a professional look and feel in your international storefronts, but it is another reason why a market price might differ from a direct currency conversion.

How do catalogs control product prices and availability?

In Shopify Markets, a catalog is a tool that controls which products are available in each market and at what price. By default, all your products are available in every market at your store's base prices, converted to the local currency. Creating a catalog allows you to override these defaults for a tailored experience.

When you create a catalog, you can:

• Set a price adjustment: Apply a percentage increase or decrease to all products included in the catalog.
• Set fixed prices: Define specific prices for individual products or variants, which overrides the general price adjustment.
• Control product availability: Include or exclude specific products from a market. A product must be included in a catalog assigned to a market for customers there to see and buy it.

You create catalogs from the Markets > Catalogs section of your admin and then assign them to the relevant markets. This connection is how your pricing rules get applied to a customer's location.

How can I update market prices in bulk?

You can manage catalog pricing and product availability for many items at once by using CSV files (Shopify Help Center). This method is useful for stores with large product catalogs. To start, you export a catalog from the Markets > Catalogs section in your Shopify admin. Shopify then sends you an email with a link to the CSV file.

The exported CSV file includes columns such as SKU, Handle, Fixed Price, and Published. You can edit the values in these columns to update prices or change which products are available in the market associated with that catalog. The export only includes products that have a fixed price set in the catalog; products priced using only a percentage adjustment are not included in the file (Shopify Help Center).

After editing the file, you can import it back into Shopify from the Catalogs page to apply your changes in bulk (Shopify Help Center).

Why this happens: Common reasons for unexpected price changes

If a market price has moved in a way you did not expect, it is usually due to one of these overlapping rules.

• A fixed price is overriding other rules: The most common reason a price is not changing with exchange rates or percentage adjustments is that a fixed price has been set for that product in the market's catalog. Fixed prices are absolute and must be updated manually.
• Catalog inheritance rules are at play: Markets can be nested, such as a "Canada" market inside a "North America" market. A submarket inherits customizations from its parent, but more specific rules win. If a product is in both the North America and Canada catalogs but at different prices, a customer in Canada will see the price from the more specific Canada catalog.
• Price rounding is enabled: If you have this setting active, Shopify automatically adjusts converted prices to the most common denominator for that currency, which keeps prices stable even as exchange rates fluctuate (Shopify Help Center).
• Manual prices have become outdated: If you use fixed prices, they do not update when exchange rates change. A significant shift in currency values can leave your international prices too high or too low, affecting your margins or sales volume. This requires a manual review and update of your fixed prices.

A worked example

Imagine you sell a T-shirt with a base price in your store of twenty dollars. You sell to your primary market (United States) and have set up two international markets: Canada and Germany.

Here is how the price for the same T-shirt could appear differently in each market:

• United States (Primary Market): The customer sees the base price of twenty dollars.
• Canada Market: You have enabled automatic currency conversion and price rounding. The base price is converted to Canadian dollars based on the current exchange rate. The rounding rule then adjusts the converted amount to a clean price, so instead of appearing as an uneven number, it shows as a more standard retail price.
• Germany Market: For this market, you created a catalog with a percentage increase to cover additional business costs. However, for this specific T-shirt, you set a fixed price of eighty-nine euros in the catalog.

In this scenario, a customer in Germany sees the fixed price of eighty-nine euros because a fixed product price always overrides a market-wide percentage adjustment and the automatic currency conversion. If you were to change the T-shirt's base price in your store, the price in Germany would remain unchanged until you manually edit that fixed price.

Read next

• Shopify's EU Omnibus price history vs your change history

Written by Odera Joseph Echendu Founder of Actorly

Odera Joseph Echendu is the founder of Actorly, a Shopify app from ONDUTYOPS LLC that keeps a searchable history of the changes it can see in a store. He spent seven years leading customer support and technical support inside high-growth SaaS and e-commerce companies.

All posts by Odera Joseph Echendu