• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 14, 2021

Shopify on Tuesday will launch a global commerce hub that helps marketers reach into new markets, optimize to specific locations, and speak the language of conversions.

The platform supports insights from nearly 1 billion Shopify orders automatically applied to each company’s global strategy to improve performance.

Cross-border ecommerce strategies have been on the minds of brands since the Internet launched, but difficulties in determining currency conversion rates and policies have stifled adoption and growth.

Forrester Research in 2017 estimated cross-border shopping would contribute 20% to ecommerce in 2022, with sales of $627 billion.

Global ecommerce sales grew 25.7% to $4.2 trillion in 2020, and increasingly those sales happen across borders. It’s estimated that by 2022 more than one in four U.S. buyers will have purchased from a merchant in a foreign country.

More than 27% of all traffic to Shopify stores in 2021 to date has come from international buyers.

Complexities like currency conversion, language localization, providing local payment methods, and duty and import taxes act as barriers to selling internationally.

Conversion rates for storefronts with localized languages in the past year rose to 1.13 times, and currencies rose 1.40 times higher.

Shopify Markets will help merchants customize their stores to support local currencies and payment methods, pricing and price rounding rules per market, product availability per market, local languages, and local domains with automatic search engine optimization, and automatically show the correct currency and language based on the buyer’s country of origin.

The hub also supports duties and import taxes on behalf of the buyer to eliminate surprise costs when products are delivered. Shopify helps merchants account for these fees when the consumer checks out.

Smart settings will allow merchants to automatically optimize for the best results, without needing a dedicated global operations team.

For example, merchants won’t need to keep track of what local payment methods are most popular in each market.