Selling cross border on Shopify

A second market is easy to switch on and hard to make money in. The orders arrive, and then the margin goes somewhere you can't see on a sales report.

Duty gets charged at the door and the parcel comes back. A discount set in pounds runs in euros and costs more than it earns. A product shows as in stock in a market you can't ship it to. None of these look like problems in Shopify admin. They look like a slightly worse month.

This is the page we send clients who sell into more than one country. The decisions are grouped by where they bite, and each one links to the detail.

Who pays at the border

This is the first decision, and the one that costs a sale when it goes wrong.

With delivered duty paid, the buyer settles duty and tax at checkout and the parcel arrives with nothing more to pay. With delivered duty unpaid, a carrier asks for money at the door. Some buyers pay. Some refuse the parcel, and you lose the sale and the shipping both ways.

Shopify Managed Markets moved its DDU markets to DDP on the 24th of August 2026, so for most merchants this is already settled. Managed Markets opened to UK merchants in July 2026, which changed the options for anyone shipping out of Britain.

Two things sit underneath that decision. The EU €3 import duty changes the maths on low value parcels into Europe. And every line you ship needs a customs code, which is why HS codes by country is worth an hour of someone's time before a busy quarter rather than during one.

What each market sees

Once parcels arrive cleanly, the question is whether the market is worth serving.

A profit by market report is the fastest way to find out. Revenue by country tells you almost nothing on its own. Shipping, duty, returns and payment fees land differently in each market, and a market that looks second on revenue can be first on profit.

Discounts by market is the setting most people miss. A code built for a home market will run everywhere unless you say otherwise, at a rate that was never meant to apply once currency and duty are in the price.

Market specific inventory deals with the opposite problem. Stock you can't ship to a country shouldn't be advertised there, and stock you can ship shouldn't be hidden because one warehouse ran out.

What Google sees

One product sold into four markets can look like four near identical pages. Shopify handles most of that for you with automatic hreflang tags, and there are setups where you want them switched off. Knowing which you're in takes a few minutes and saves a confusing month.

Getting goods into Europe

For UK sellers this is the whole brief rather than a setting. VAT, duties, carrier choice and returns all have to agree with each other before the first parcel goes out. Shopify UK to EU shipping covers how we set that up.

Where to start

If you're already selling into more than one country and it isn't paying, work in this order.

1. Check who pays duty at the border in every market you're live in.
2. Run a profit by market report and find the market that's quietly losing money.
3. Look at which discounts and which stock are visible where.
4. Then, and only then, worry about hreflang and search settings.

The order matters because the first two cost you money this month. The last one costs you rankings over a year.

Where Parallel Commerce helps

We build and run Shopify stores for UK and European businesses that sell across borders, and this is the part clients ask about most after launch. If you want a second pair of eyes on a setup that's already live, send us the store and we'll tell you what we'd fix first in a free store review.

Ongoing work sits inside our Shopify support packages, where cross border settings are the kind of thing we check before peak rather than after it.

If something is already going wrong in a market, book a call and tell us which one.