Setting Up Shopify Markets for Multi-Currency
Shopify Markets is the foundation for selling in multiple currencies. It lets you define geographic markets, each with its own currency, pricing strategy, and domain or subfolder routing. When a customer visits your store, Shopify detects their location via IP geolocation and presents prices in the corresponding market's currency. The setup is straightforward in the admin: create a market, assign countries to it, enable the local currency, and configure whether prices are auto-converted from your base currency using exchange rates or manually set per product. The choice between automatic and manual pricing has significant implications for how your prices appear and how your margins behave as exchange rates fluctuate.
Automatic currency conversion uses Shopify's daily exchange rates with an optional percentage adjustment to protect margins. This works well for stores that want a hands-off approach, but it produces prices that look unpolished. A product priced at $29.99 USD might convert to €28.37 EUR, which feels arbitrary to the customer. To counter this, Shopify offers rounding rules that snap converted prices to psychologically appealing numbers, such as rounding to .99 or .95. Configuring these rounding rules per market is essential for maintaining the professional appearance of your pricing across currencies.
Price Display Consistency and Rounding Pitfalls
One of the most common issues with multi-currency stores is price inconsistency across touchpoints. The price shown on the collection page, the product page, the cart, and the checkout must all match exactly. When rounding rules are applied, this usually works seamlessly for the storefront. However, problems arise when third-party apps, custom JavaScript, or headless frontends calculate prices independently. If an app reads the base currency price and applies its own conversion without respecting Shopify's rounding rules, the customer sees one price on the product page and a different price in the app's widget. This erodes trust and can lead to cart abandonment.
In Liquid themes, always use the money_with_currency or money filters on prices retrieved from the variant's price property, which already reflects the customer's local currency when Markets is active. Never hardcode currency symbols or perform manual conversion in your templates. For JavaScript that runs on the client, use the Shopify.currency.active object and the Currency.convert method provided by Shopify's built-in scripts, or fetch prices from the Storefront API's priceRange field with the buyer's context, which returns prices in the correct currency with all adjustments applied. The key principle is to let Shopify be the single source of truth for converted prices rather than recomputing them yourself.
App Compatibility and Liquid Currency Filters
Third-party app compatibility is the most persistent headache in multi-currency implementations. Many apps were built before Shopify Markets existed and still reference prices in the store's base currency. Review apps that display pricing, loyalty and rewards apps that calculate point values, upsell apps that show discounted prices, and bundling apps that compute totals can all show incorrect amounts if they haven't been updated to support multi-currency. Before launching a multi-currency store, audit every installed app by testing it with a VPN set to a non-default market and verifying that all prices display correctly. Contact app developers for those that don't, and be prepared to replace apps that lack multi-currency support.
Liquid provides several filters specifically for multi-currency scenarios. The money filter formats a price in the customer's local currency with the correct symbol and decimal format. The money_with_currency filter appends the currency code, which is helpful when you sell in currencies that share a symbol (e.g., USD and CAD both use $). For stores that want to show the base price alongside the local price, you can access the variant's price in the shop's currency separately and display both. Be cautious with this pattern, as displaying two prices can confuse customers if not clearly labeled.
Multi-currency on Shopify is not a feature you toggle on and forget. It requires ongoing attention to exchange rate fluctuations, rounding rule tuning, app audits, and testing across markets. But when implemented thoroughly, it removes one of the biggest barriers to international sales: the moment a customer sees a price in an unfamiliar currency and decides to shop elsewhere.