Sitting outside here at Shopify Enterprise Partner Summit enjoying the LA warmth and reflecting on my Shopify journey. Ambaum joined the Shopify Plus partner program in 2016, very thankful for Mac King as he was the Shopify Partner Manager that got us in. Mac’s agency Half Helix just merged with Tomorrow and got a big shoutout from Bobby Morrison yesterday as the conference kicked off.
Shopify has grown up since we joined the Plus program and the emphasis on Enterprise reminds me of my work at PwC. All the large consulting companies are here in LA, especially Accenture and E&Y, they both came out strong for the conference.
Seven years ago Shopify wasn’t ready to tackle Enterprise e-commerce (arguably not even three years ago), but they are now. Here’s why Shopify is poised to excel in Enterprise:
Shopify is a founder led company. Tobias Lütke is a deep thinker who is trying to bring commerce to the entire world. I don’t work for Shopify, but just doing my part for the ecosystem gives me an immense amount of pride. Even Chamath Palihapitiya is in love with Tobi after his talk at the All-In Summit.
Almost two years ago, the first Shopify Editions launched and I can’t emphasize enough how important this is. Tobi was inspired by the apparel industry and their fall and summer releases. He took that concept and created a six month cadence for new product features. All of a sudden the pace of development on the core Shopify platform went up dramatically and there is now an expectation for future releases, absolutely love it!
Shopify has 4,000 developers working on infrastructure, core platform features, Hydrogen, POS and more. The other e-commerce platforms have nowhere near this level of firepower.
Shopify spends 50% of it’s budget on R&D, really an extraordinary number when you think about all the SAAS companies that lead with sales and backfill on product development.
Shopify has a 66.3B market cap 📈 and BigCommerce has a 700M market cap, a massive valuation advantage for Shopify.
This is pure speculation, but around 2 years ago it feels like Tobi grabbed the reins of Shopify and dug in to improve the core platform. The benefits are showing up everywhere and something as simple as Shopify Editions brought a whole new level of discipline and focus to the company. It’s Shopify’s time to tackle Enterprise, here they come.
Ken and Gene Neal founded BP Diesel in 2002 and started a line of high-quality custom-made truck parts: water pumps, brake lights, oil systems, engine parts and much more. Gene handled the website and got BP Diesel started selling online on Volusion, but by 2019 they reached a point in their growth trajectory where they started to look around for a platform that could fully support them. Gene found Shopify Plus and then reached out to Ambaum to get started on scoping out the development of a new custom theme and migrating BP Diesel’s data.
Scoping & Timeline
BP Diesel had recently completed a site redesign and was not looking for us to help them with a complete redesign, but they did want some subtle design help on their product detail page. The client did not have an aggressive timeline for completing the project, they wanted to get through their 2019 holiday busy season and launch in spring of 2020. From start the finish the project took 8 months, but the last 2 months the client was pushing back the timeline to get some of their internal processes lined up to go live. Our typical timeframe to move a customer from Volusion to Shopify is 4-5 months to complete the redesign, build, migration and any customizations we need to develop.
Custom Theme Build
Ambaum developed the new BP Diesel Shopify Plus site on top of Shopify Theme Kit. Shopify Theme Kit is a command line tool that manages its connection using a private app. We were able to leverage our proprietary custom theme that includes a lot of pre-built sections, snippets, scripts, icons, and much more. Our starter theme gave BP Diesel the benefits of a professional theme and they also got the flexibility of building everything from the ground up to fully accommodate the look of their new store. The new theme for BP Diesel included the following pages:
Home
Collection
Product Detail
About Us
Blog
Cart
Forms
Static Text Template Page
Mega Nav
Ambaum built the custom theme in a development environment and BP Diesel was able to view progress and give feedback through the process.
Product Migration
Ambaum helped BP Diesel moved their existing data from the last 10 years on Volusion to Shopify Plus. When the new site launched customers could login to Shopify Plus and see their past order data and view all historical information. In addition, we created a launch email to notify past customers about the launch so they could come check out the new site. The migration covered the following data elements:
Products
Customers
Orders
Product Review Migration
301 redirects were created for the oldVolusion URLs that pointed to the new URLs on the Shopify site
When we exported Volusion product data it was all lumped into one field and we needed to break it apart so we could setup products correctly in Shopify. Our team wrote custom scripts in PHP + we used the Shopify Product API to allow us to separate out products into tags, kits into tags, shipping to tags and products warnings to tags. Our script also allowed us to identify embedded You Tube and magazine hyperlinks so we could place them in Shopify metafields. The initial Volusion data migration did not bring over each order number and their ERP needed that so Ambaum setup a script to fix the relationship and update each of the orders with the proper number.
Core Charges & Kits
Some of BP Diesel are sold with a refundable core charge. When you add the product to the cart, you will see the core charge show as an additional product:
The customer is required to buy the core along with the part, but if they choose to the core can be returned to BP Diesel for a refund. We leveraged tags to make sure the approximately 10 products with core charges would show up on the product detail page and in the cart. Ambaum also used Ajax calls to show different cores that were buried in kits with multiple products.
BP Diesel sells kits which are bundles made up of many different individual products. On the product detail page of a kit we wanted to show each individual product that made up the kit, here is an example:
Also, when you add the kit to the cart it will show each of the child products. These child products are zero–dollar product variants that are associated with the “handle” or the URL slug of each product.
Filtering
BP Diesel wanted custom filtering throughout the site and wanted it front and center on the home page. The ability to shop by vehicle, shop by product, select make, select model and select year were critical filters as that is how their customers think when they are looking for a particular automotive part. Ambaum worked with Gene and decided to use the Automotive Part Search app, which powers that front make, model and year filter on the home page. We needed to create robust filters for each of the collection pages so we leveraged the Product Filter and Search app to give BP Diesel customers a number of advanced product filters. We were also able to make the filters unique to particular collectionsto give BP Diesel a lot of flexibility for all their custom automotive products.
This post will explore Ambaum’s thoughts, best practices and lessons learned from multiple Magento to Shopify Plus migrations. Going through a re-platform event is challenging and to do it right you must be skilled at: project management, programming, design, data migrations, integrations, theme development and much more. This article will focus specifically on our lessons learned during the data migration portion of Magento to Shopify Plus migrations.
Before we walk through the details of our data migration experiences let’s explore the macro trends that are driving merchants to adopt Shopify Plus.
The Old Paradigm
Since the beginning of the 20th century manufacturers and brands have sold their products to customers through brick and mortar stores. Only in the late 1990’s was there a shift in how customers bought good and online ordering through the Internet became a real way to move your products. Initially the greatest new channel for manufacturers and brands came through Amazon as these companies leveraged Amazon’s established customer base. In 2020, Amazon now accounts for almost 38% of all online sales in the US so it continues to make sense for manufacturers and brands to sell on Amazon.
The old paradigm is a multi-step process for manufacturers to get their products in the hands of customers. A manufacturer sells to a wholesaler then a distributor, then to a retailer and finally into the hands of a customer. Amazon came along and became the online distributor for many manufacturers, but Amazon extracted a heavy toll of approximately 15% (or more) on products sold through their site.
Even with Amazon’s high take rate of ~15%, manufacturers could still make money, but Amazon was extracting a heavy “tax” on everything sold through their site. In addition, brands that sold through Amazon are unable to fully own their customer data and market to customers because Amazon really owns the customer. Brands on Amazon get access to millions of customers, but the brands remain renters, Amazon is the owner in that relationship. Amazon’s high take rate wasn’t sustainable for manufacturers and brands so they went in search of a new model.
The New Paradigm
Manufacturers and brands rely on Amazon to sell a lot of their products, but the trade-off is a heavy reduction in margins. The answer for most brands and manufacturers is to sell their own products direct to customers through the channel they can fully own – their website. This isn’t an earth-shattering revelation, but it’s an important distinction that has fueled the rise of ecommerce platforms in the last 15 years.
Frustrated with the large cost of general maintenance support fees/time spent by developers
Unable to easily implement and rapidly iterate on digital marketing ideas
Loss of control over day to day site updates, general pain with making even small changes on Magento
Once the decision has been made to move to Shopify Plus, merchants want to know how the following data can get safely, securely and accurately moved over:
Customer records
Products
Historical orders
Product reviews
Blogs posts
301 redirects
The rest of this post if going to focus on our lessons learned form moving over customer, product and order data from the merchant’s systems into Shopify Plus.
Magento to Shopify Plus Data Migration Example
Data migrations can be messy business. The migration must be planned out correctly, the data needs to be mapped from the old system to Shopify Plus and you need a way to test and handle exceptions in the process. After performing more than 10 migrations in the last 2 years, we have a pretty good idea of best practices as well as the things to watch out for during a data migration process.
We recently moved data into Shopify Plus from Magento and multiple legacy systems and data sources which presented data in vastly different formats. This client had three systems we needed to import data from:
Magento: ~125,000 customer records
Retail Point of Sale System: ~80,000 customer records
Mail Order Software: ~70,000 customer records
Each of the customer records was supposed to contain the following fields: customer name, phone number, email, however many of the records were duplicate or missing data. Many of the records only had a name and in order to get them into Shopify Plus we had to create dummy email addresses and if there was no phone number, we left that blank.
In the case where we had no email record, we would take the first and last name of the customer and combine with @noemail.com to create a dummy record. Because there were so many generic names such as “John Smith” we would encounter a problem with non-unique records. If there were multiple “John Smith” records, we ended up having to use their phone number + @noemail.com for their email record.
Things to Consider Prior to your Shopify Plus Data Migration
Practice proper data hygiene – there is a direct correlation with the hygiene and quality of data going in with the data integrity post-import. The GIGO acronym applies here: garbage in, garbage out
Phone numbers can live in different places in Shopify – when importing phone number into Shopify, they can place those records at different levels, depending on how you import the data.
Import via Excelify or CSV – the customer record will end up in the “Customer overview” field
Import via API – the customer record will end up in the “Default address” section
Pre-clean your email addresses – make sure they are correct format and email domains are real
Pre-clean your phone numbers – ensure there is a proper phone format, pick a phone format such as: 12063456789, +12063456789, or 2063456789 and use this format for all phone numbers
Determine the source of truth – If you are importing from multiple data sources, first and foremost determine which data set is the master and import that last (since Shopify will overwrite previous records). If you are only doing a Magento to Shopify data import with no other systems, this won’t be an issue.
Shopify will use different customer data fields to create a unique customer ID – If you have incomplete customer records Shopify checks the customer data fields (in this order) to find the:
Shopify ID
Email Address
Phone Number
For example, if your new data contains a Shopify ID that already exists in your Shopify dataset, Shopify will overwrite the new customer data on the old record. If your data is missing a Shopify ID, your unique customer email address will trigger Shopify to create a new unique customer ID. If your data is missing a Shopify ID and missing an email address, your customer phone number will trigger Shopify to create your unique Shopify ID.
Customers should be imported before orders – If you import order data before customer data, Shopify will look at that order data and create a Shopify ID so that the order data is associated with a customer. If you then go in and import new customer data you could end up with data integrity issues because you didn’t follow the proper order of operations.
Blank fields in a CSV import will overwrite existing data in Shopify – When you are importing new customer records, if your customer ID matches an ID already in Shopify and your import is missing the address field, your customer record in Shopify will no longer contain address information, it will be blank.
Shopify checks email address formatting – Customer and order records will not import if the email address is either:
An improperly formatted email address such as: danny.companyx.com
Not a registered domain name. Shopify is most likely taking each domain name and comparing it to a master list of domain names that have been officially registered.
General Data Migration Best Practices
Data formats – the data you plan to import should be in one of these formats: 1) JSON, (2) CSV, (3) XLSX, (4) XML (but this is a last resort- XML can be hard to work with sometimes)
If you anticipate that scripting will be necessary, then JSON is probably the best option for exporting data
There are online tools available for converting file formats, here is one we like to use: CSV to JSON file conversions
CSV imports are faster than the Shopify API – the Shopify API imposes a rate limit of roughly 2 records per second, so large datasets can take days or even weeks to import into Shopify via the API
Utilize Shopify metafields and tags to deal with custom data fields – For example, a merchant might have a custom field for BOGO sales, so in Shopify a tag can be created and then with some code you can look for the tag and then display a sale message on Collection and Product pages to the customer.
Leverage migration apps – Excelify is a good one that we have used and had success with, but keep in mind that apps can’t do everything. For example, Excelify is good for importing WordPress Blog Posts into Shopify but it’s not good for importing WooCommerce Orders. The Excelify developers have built the app to automatically map the blog post fields to Shopify but the app will not automatically map the order fields. Store owners can use migration tools to Migrate from Magento to Shopify Plus (including Magento 1, 2, CE, EE, Shopify, Shopify Plus) from Litextension – a company specialized in shopping cart data migration.
Migrate a test batch of data and then start analyzing
Compare Shopify data to source data and start figuring out what needs to be fixed. For example, maybe the “cost per item” showed up in the “compare at price” field or maybe all product reviews are missing their images. You’ll need to troubleshoot those types of things. Issues might need to be addressed by a custom script, an app, or some configuration in the export or import.
Keep in mind that every e-commerce platform has different fields available to shop owners and Shopify might not have a good solution for migrating all of the data. There will be some situations where you need to get creative and find a way to not only migrate the data but how to use it on the frontend. For example, one client had some data that was being used to link customers to specific magazines. We dumped all of the data into a Shopify metafield as a JSON object and then wrote some code to find the link that was needed on the frontend. It turned out to be a good solution because it provided a single source for the client to maintain the data and it was fairly easy to access the data from the frontend.
Project Management and Data Dependency Considerations
Think about dependencies. Which data is dependent on other data? For example, Orders need to be linked to Customers and Products and Product Reviews need to be linked to Products. So with that in mind, I suggest migrating Products first and then Customers. After that the order doesn’t matter but I think this would be a good order: Products, Customers, Orders, Product Reviews, Blog Posts, Pages, Discounts, and then any custom data such as QuickBooks for example.
After all of the data has been migrated then you need to take care of the redirects because Shopify has different folders structures. For example, WordPress blog URLs look like this: “domain.com/blog-post-name” and Shopify blog URLs look like this: “domain.com/blogs/blog-name/blog-post-name”. The redirects prevent 404s.
Also, keep in mind that while you are migrating data there are still customers shopping and shop owners making updates. So just before launch you will need to re-migrate anything that has been updated, added, or deleted. Such as Products, Customers, Orders, Product Reviews, and Blog Posts. Check with the client to get an idea about what has changed and be sure to work that into the timeline and budget.
Communicate Often to Keep Everyone in Alignment
It’s important to update the client regularly if you are helping perform a data migration. Merchants want to know that progress is being made and they also want to know when something isn’t working as expected. If there is an issue that you need to tell the client about, be tactful and try to present a solution at the same time.
Data can be complicated, and it pays to plan way ahead when doing a data migration. Hopefully these tips we presented in this post can help make your next Shopify Plus data migration just a little smoother!
There is an astounding amount of data in the eCommerce world waiting to be collected. As an eCommerce merchant, it is necessary to use a variety of tools to capture all relevant information. Here are some of the core data collection tools a Shopify Plus merchant would use:
We will refer to these as foundational tools, used by merchants to collect information about products, marketing campaigns, sales, and customers. Foundational tools are the primary method of capturing data that have a very close proximity to an eCommerce transaction.
These foundational tools hold strategic insights into the overall health of your business. With Google Analytics you can segment your site visitors, see the average time on site, create goals to track conversions and much more. Shopify (and pretty much all eCommerce platforms) have integrated reporting and analytics that will convey your average order value, conversion rate, sessions by traffic source and details about your conversion funnel. Google and Facebook advertising platforms also have insightful data about your ad spend, conversions, ad effectiveness, cost per click and cost per customer acquisition.
How do Shopify Merchants Analyze their Data?
Foundational tools collect much of the data that you need, but the sheer amount of data can be overwhelming. To find valuable information within the data, time must be regularly spent on each tool’s dashboard. However, your time is also valuable and your focus is likely needed in many other areas of your business. This can make it difficult to dedicate your limited resources towards data analyzation.
In addition to too much data, there are attribution issues that arise between these different foundational tools. For example, if your customer clicked on a Google ad, landed on your site, went away for 2 weeks and then clicked on a Facebook ad and made a purchase, which ad gets credit for the conversion? That is just one scenario among many that may arise where it’s necessary to use attribution modeling for Google and Facebook. While attribution modeling isn’t perfect, it’s still the best method for choosing where to allocate marketing dollars.
In this era of big data, how do eCommerce businesses draw logical and actionable conclusions? We reached out to our Shopify Plus merchants. Here are their answers:
Do very little digital marketing (surprising!)
In-house digital marketing team
Use an outside marketing agency
The first approach may seem a bit shocking but is not entirely uncommon. Some of the merchants we support were born in an analog world and grew through word-of-mouth, then transitioned to online, transferring their offline customers with them. This cohort of merchants already does well enough with an outdated strategy, image how much growth they could achieve with a digital marketing team.
Some of our more digitally-inclined clients have in-house marketing teams managing their ecommerce ad spend and looking at a variety of digital tools. They employ many of the foundational data tools discussed, such as Shopify, Google Ads, Analytics, and SEM Rush to find SEO and SEM opportunities and to monitor performance. Overall, these in-house teams agree on the effectiveness of the tools as well as the lamentation of resources (time and people) necessary to properly use them.
For some eCommerce merchants, the best solution to the resource strain of data analysis is in using an outside digital marketing agency. This approach allows a knowledgable agency to sort through the foundational data tools for the merchant and deliver comprehensive and actional reports based on key metrics. The success of using an outside agency is closely related to the strength of the relationship between both parties. You want your marketing agency to care about your success as much as you do. Simple.
Data Visualization Tools that Sit on top of Foundational Tools
Even simpler? Aggregating the data from foundational tools and displaying that information in a report or dashboard format. Currently, there are many of these data visualization tools. Here are some examples that target the corporate environment (Fortune 5,000 companies are the sweet spot):
These data visualization tools are predominantly geared for industries like health care, hospitality, manufacturing, education, and financial services. They will work for eCommerce, but they are not explicitly designed to accommodate eCommerce merchants. These visualization tools have a lot of functionality but are often overkill for SMB companies on Shopify Plus.
What is Missing in the Market?
The next wave of digital tools will likely be data visualization software geared for eCommerce merchants on platforms like Shopify Plus. Leveraging foundational tools and providing real-time information and data visualization on the following metrics is the current gap in the market:
Average Order Amount
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC)
Order Frequency
Customer Churn
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
CLV with Margin
These metrics will make or break your store. It is amazing how many companies operate without really knowing their core numbers. Understanding your Customer Lifetime Value relative to your Customer Acquisition Costs is the holy grail for an eCommerce business. When you take that information and segment by customer cohort and, more importantly, by marketing source, you know whether your business is profitable and why it’s profitable.
It still feels like eCommerce is in “Day 1” and this could be the next big opportunity for companies that step in to fill this gap.
Shopify Unite 2019 has kicked off! Today was packed with announcements and features that Shopify will release throughout the rest of this year. Huge updates to the Shopify Plus experience are rolling out and Shopify Fulfillment could be an amazing option for merchants that want an integrated logistics and fulfillment experience. Shopify thinks of itself as an end to end retail operating system. There are a ton of features being released, read on for our notes.
Next week we are hosting our first trade show booth at IRCE in Chicago and Ambaum will be hosting workshops during the conference. If you are in Chicago, stop by and say hello!
Cynthia Savard Saucier, Director of User Experience
2016 introduced Sections to the Shopify home page, now in 2019 Sections will be rolled out in the entire online store
Introducing the idea of Master pages and you can edit multiple pages at the same time, you can edit a single section on a master page and have it roll through to the entire site
Apps are coming to sections, you can add an app to a page as easy as it is to add text and images
Can create a Product Master page, add product reviews and it will show up on all product pages under the Product Master page
Content portability – merchants can switch themes and all of their content will follow
Drafts – merchants can try out larger changes to their theme in a “dev” environment
Sections API – in developer preview currently
Support for new media types – video and 3D images are natively supported on product detail pages
3D Model – when a customer interacts with a 3D model they are 2X as likely to purchase
Checkout speed and performance – 20% reduced latency compared to 3 months ago
Checkout app extensions – partners can build apps that extend into the checkout
Subscriptions – allowing for subscription apps to enter into the checkout flow and customers don’t have to leave Shopify, including a partnership with ReCharge
David Moellenkamp, Director of Product
Headless commerce – requires a platform that allows for extensibility and Shopify is primed for growth here with merchants already using Shopify this way
Custom storefront tools can now support metafields, multicurrency and shopify scripts
Multicurrency – rolled out to Shopify Plus in early 2019, some merchants that have enabled this have seen a 60% lift in their International conversion rates, now multicurrency will be available to all merchants on Shopify Payments
Added currencies – Netherlands and Denmark
Multi Language API(available today for the developer community) – with these new APIs you can store translated content for blogs, products and serve up localized content for buyers around the world
Arpan Podduturi, Director of Product
Shopify POS now powers over 100,000 merchants, driving billions in sales
Shopify Retail Kit (rolled out in April 2019) – new tap and chip case (merchant’s logo can be added to case) accepts credit cards and contactless payments anywhere in the store, no more checkout lines
POS Cart App Extensions – automatically surface loyalty and promotion awards during checkout, include a customer and the extension will call a loyalty app
New Shopify POS – ground up rebuild and apps get first class treatment, home screen includes a smart grid that shows merchant specific workflows and can include specific apps
Camera based scanning and POS search uses the core Shopify search technology
Retail Staff roles – store managers can give staff a login that is tailored to their role
Buy online and pickup in store – buyers can check out online and pickup in nearby stores (currently in a closed beta with merchants)
All new POS – available later in 2019
Lynsey Thornton, General Manager of Core Product
Shipping Profiles – assign delivery rules and rates by product and location, use the API to create custom shipping solutions for merchants through the GraphQL API
Fulfillment – GraphQL Fulfillment API, add visibility, flexibility and control through the fulfillment process
Changing a Customer’s Order – order editing now exists! In the next few months every merchant will now have the ability to edit an order
Order Editing API now released – alter orders, add custom items and even send a notice for additional payment from the customer
Shopify launching in 11 more languages, spoken by 2B people in the world
Shopify Plus
Over $1B in sales from Plus merchants
New Shopify Plus Dashboard – use a single merged identity account to access information across all stores
Information and Analytics will be available in one single location
In Shopify Plus – stores are added with a few clicks, in the future support will exist for expansion stores
All staff accounts in Plus will be managed from one central place
Multi Store Tools – global customer view now in Shopify Plus, searching for the customer will bring up a single customer record across the business
Shopify Flow – 1.8B tasks automated so far in Shopify Flow, enable workflows across all stores
Launching in the next few months for Plus customers
Vanessa Lee, Director of Product
4 major goals for the app platform:
Easier to build – Shopify app command line interface and helps manage all development stores and populate a sandbox store, Shopify APP CLI
Making apps more embedded in Shopify – EASDK and POSDK overhauled with the Shopify app bridge, works with development tools: supports context bar, product picker and barcode scanner (merchants can scan barcodes with your app)
Speed – Doubling down on GraphQL, today with REST you’d have to make 11 API calls just to get the details of one order, with GraphQL it’s now just one API call and you have to parse through less data, still supporting REST but leaning in to GraphQL even more, 2,000 apps now using Graph QL (new documentation rolling out)
Stability – Admin, storefront and checkout API versioning, will roll out updates each quarter and be supported for at least a year
Craig Miller, Chief Product Officer
Merchants have numerous 3rd party logistic/fulfillment issues – complex pricing, increased inventory costs, incompatible technology, poor performance
Marketplace fulfillment – large merchants only, unfair competition, using merchant data to compete with the merchants that use them
Shopify Fulfillment Network – fulfillment centers setup all throughout the US and use machine learning to figure out where merchants’ SKUs should be located
Here’s how it works – install the Fulfillment app, select the products, get quote and then send Shopify the products
Shopify Fulfillment channel supports – retail, wholesale, social channels, custom packaging, returns and exchanges as well as kitting and supports merchant of every size even merchants sending 10K+ packages/day
Deliver to 99% of the continental US in 2 days
If you run a fulfillment center and are interested in partnering with Shopify they are partnering as well
Spending over $1B to build out the Shopify Fulfillment Network
Harley Finkelstein, Chief Operating Officer
820,000 merchants on Shopify
$41B of products sold in 2018
218M buyers have purchased something off Shopify in the last 12 months
Our Shopify Plus Happy Hour event was a hit last night! Thank you to everyone who showed up and contributed to the good vibes. A special thanks goes to Do The Extraordinary for allowing us to host the event in their speakeasy (what a cool venue!) and to The Catering Company for providing amazing food and beverages!
We had a lot of fun getting to catch up with some old friends as well as meeting new people and establishing new connections. We hope everyone enjoyed the happy hour as much as we did and we look forward to the next event!
At Shopify Unite in May this year, Shopify announced the upcoming plans for offering multi-currency functionality for their stores. This was a very big deal for a couple reasons: many other eCommerce platforms already offer this and secondly there were workarounds to make this work for your Shopify stores, but they were very clunky. For example if you wanted to sell in multiple currencies, you could create multiple versions of your store (in different currencies and languages), but there was no way to sync all your reporting and data between them. When this goes live for Shopify Plus stores in December this should be a huge benefit to everyone that wants to offer products in the 9 currencies listed below.
If you have any questions on how this could work for your store, don’t hesitate to reach out and we’d be happy to chat! Here are notes from a recent Shopify multi-currency webinar that happened earlier this week:
Currencies:
Great British Pound (GBP)
Euro (EUR)
United States Dollar (USD)
Canadian Dollar (CAD)
Australian Dollar (AUD)
Hong Kong Dollar (HKD)
New Zealand Dollar (NZD)
Japan Yen (JPY)
Singapore Dollar (SGD)
Additional Notes:
Only for Shopify Payments customers, but still in beta and not live yet, but planning to go live before end of year (will be after BFCM)
Initially just for Shopify Plus customers
Currency selector in top right-hand corner
Selector can automatically detect country and will default to shop currency
You can apply rounding to prices
If a customer selects another payment option like PayPal on checkout it will default to shop currency
In the Admin panel to go settings and then within the Shopify payments section there is a new section for Shopify currencies and you can toggle on and off different currencies
On the product page in Admin you can see exchange rates for different currencies to give you an idea of your products price in that currency
Flow can present the currency code displayed to the buyer
API: presentment currency – currency shown to customers and the shop currency – currency used by merchants
Debut theme is updated to allow multi-currency
Shopify scripts will also allow multi-currency
Multi-currency migration guide soon to be released
Long term the intent is to allow merchants to be able to set individual prices (in different currencies) per product
Currency rate check happens approximately every 15 minutes
