Shopify localisation: languages, currencies and Markets done properly

"Does Shopify work in our language?" Yes — with caveats, and the caveats are exactly what you need to know before you decide.

Three layers that translate separately

The admin

The interface you work in. You can switch the language in your profile. Translations are decent but occasionally mechanical — for some of the more advanced settings it's easier to keep English, because most documentation and most answers you'll search for are in English.

The storefront the customer sees

Theme strings, buttons, messages. This is on you and on the theme. Good themes have every string pulled out into locale files, so they can be translated through the content editor without touching code. Cheap themes hard-code text into Liquid, and translating means digging through templates — which you'll do again after every theme update.

This is one of the first places where you find out whether the theme was built properly.

Checkout and system emails

Shopify translates checkout itself for supported languages. Notification emails — order confirmation, shipping, password reset — are templates you can edit. Go through all of them. There are around twenty, and it takes one unedited template for a customer to get an English email at precisely the moment they're anxious.

One store or several?

If you want to serve several markets, you have two options.

One store, several languages. Shopify Markets lets you add languages, currencies and a domain or subfolder per market. Products are managed once and translations run alongside them. For most businesses this is the right path — less work, one inventory, one admin.

Separate stores. This makes sense when catalogue, pricing or brand differ substantially between markets. It means doubling the work on every change.

If the catalogues themselves differ rather than just the language and currency, the choice is bigger than Markets — see multiple stores or Markets.

Don't skip hreflang

With a multi-language setup, hreflang matters. Shopify generates it with Markets, but verify it — without it your language versions cannibalise each other in search results, which is the most common technical SEO failure I see on multi-market stores.

Don't machine-translate

Neighbouring languages are similar enough that it's tempting to run everything through a translator and be done. Don't. Native speakers spot it immediately and read it, subconsciously, as "this isn't for me." You'll survive it on product descriptions; you won't on terms and conditions or checkout.

Watch the details a translator won't catch either: address format, postcode, phone prefixes, forms of address, date format. Small things, but they add up into an impression.

Currency and prices

Multiple currencies in one store means conversion. Shopify can convert automatically at the exchange rate, but the result is a price like 1,247.38 — which looks wrong on a shelf. Turn on price rounding with a rule you choose, or set prices per market manually for key products. Also check which payment methods are available in each market; availability varies more than people expect.

Localised catalogue data

Structured attributes — materials, care instructions, specifications — need translating too. If they live in metafields and metaobjects they translate cleanly through the same workflow. If someone put them in the product description as formatted HTML, every language means retyping it.

Pre-launch checklist

1. The theme has all strings in locale files, not in templates.
2. All ~20 notification emails are translated and tested.
3. Terms, returns policy and privacy are in each market's language and written by a person.
4. Hreflang works between language versions.
5. Converted prices are rounded sensibly.
6. Address and phone formats fit each country.
7. Payment and shipping methods are checked per market.

Localisation isn't translation. It's the accumulation of small things that tell a customer this store is for them — or that it's from somewhere else.