Welcome to this brand new section, which I've called Going International.
And that's because I'm now going to show you how you can take your store to an international market.
Now, first of all, great news because with all of the amazing hard work that you've put in to get
to this point, taking your business international is in fact a fairly easy step.
And so in this lecture, we're going to start with the markets themselves.
Now of course, you will remember many lectures ago we set up our two markets, the first one being
our primary market which is typically the market where you live or where your business is based.
And so while I've been recording this, I've been in Portugal, which is why Portugal is my primary
market.
And then in addition to that, of course, we set up the United States.
And that's because I encouraged you to start your business in the US, as it is the largest and easiest
market to get started.
And then just as a reminder, if I go over to the checkout, of course, in this country region box,
when I open this up, we only see Portugal and the United States because those are our active markets.
But of course, in order to sell internationally, we want to have every single country in the world
listed in this menu.
And so in order to do that, what we need to do is go back to the markets themselves and activate the
international market.
So clicking into international, the first thing we'll want to do is to come up here where it says more
actions.
And then click on Edit Market.
Now for the market name we can leave as is.
International is absolutely perfect.
But you will notice that of the 237 countries that are available, only 26 of them are currently included
in my international market.
And so the first thing I want to do is to include all of the other countries in the world.
And to do that, I just click on this edit button.
And then for each region, starting with Africa, select all of the countries.
So for Africa I check the box.
You can now see that all 62 countries in Africa have been included for Asia.
At the moment I only have seven out of 48, but if I uncheck this and then check it again, I now get
all 48 countries collapsing this menu.
I'll do the same thing for Europe.
And here you'll notice that 51 of 52 countries have been selected.
And that's because Portugal, which is in Europe, is already in my primary market.
So collapsing the European menu will do the same for North America.
And by default it's going to include the United States.
So we want to remove that.
So scrolling on down towards the bottom here here is the US.
So let's uncheck that then select Oceania.
And then finally South America.
And with all that done we can then click on save.
And so now we need to set up shipping for our international market.
And you can see at the moment that it's only partially configured.
And that's because we've only set up shipping to 26 countries.
But of course we just added all of the other countries in the world.
So we also need to set up shipping for them.
And so to do that we come over to shipping and delivery, click into the general section and then scroll
down to the shipping zones where of course we've already set up shipping zones for both the domestic
market and the United States.
And so to add all of the countries in international into our international shipping zone, come over
here to these three little dots, click on Edit Zone.
And then here where you see international.
Simply uncheck and check the box to include every single other zone in the world.
And then click on done.
We can then save this and then scroll up and go back to our markets.
Because the only thing left to do now is to actually activate our international market, because as
you can see, it's still inactive.
So to do that we click into it.
And then up here where it says inactive, simply make it active, click on save once again.
And then coming out of here you can now see that we have three active markets my primary, the United
States and international.
And then just to check that everything's working perfectly.
If I go back to the checkout and refresh now when I click into this country region box, every single
country in the world is now listed.
And that means we can now sell internationally.
Now, just before I finish this lecture, I want to talk about the exciting subject of taxes, because
I get asked this all the time.
And so going back to markets, if you click into any of these markets.
So for example, the United States, you're going to see this duties and import taxes.
And when I click into it this is where Shopify gives me the opportunity to set up duties and import
taxes for, in this case, the United States.
But of course I could do this for any country in the world.
So the question therefore becomes, what do I put in here?
Well, first of all, duties and import taxes can become very complicated very quickly.
Secondly, I am not a tax advisor, so I am not in a position to give you professional advice.
But what I would like to do is at least give you some kind of a roadmap.
And the roadmap is this when you first start selling in your store, please don't worry too much about
duties and import taxes when you only have a few sales.
It makes little sense.
Is to start spending an awful lot of time setting all of this up.
However, of course your business is going to grow.
What you sell and where you sell.
It may attract duties and import taxes, but at that point you will have some money, your business
will be generating revenue, and it's at that point that you should engage a local tax advisor.
And it's important that it's local, because duties and import taxes vary enormously throughout the
world, and it's also a moving target.
Things change all the time, but your local advisor will take care of all of that.
They will advise you on what numbers you need to put into this section of your store, so that you are
collecting duties and import taxes in the correct way.
So in summary, please don't worry too much about this.
In the beginning you can basically leave as is, but once those sales start rolling in, that's the
time to get professional advice.
Okay, brilliant.
Our markets are now all set up, but now that we're selling internationally, it would make sense for
our site to be available in many languages because of course at the moment it's only available in English.
So how can we easily translate our store into multiple languages so that millions more potential customers
can understand exactly what we're selling?
Well, let's have a look at that in the next lecture.