Different prices per market in Shopify: how it works and where it stops

Every market has a currency and a list of countries. By default a market follows your base price: Shopify computes the price from your store's main price, the adjustment you set for that market and the exchange rate, rounded if the market rounds its prices. You did not type that price, and it moves when the rate moves. If the market uses a manual exchange rate instead, your buyers' price holds still, and you gain or lose on the gap between your rate and the market's.

When you want to decide the price yourself, the market needs custom prices. A custom price is an amount you set, stored in the market's price list, in that list's currency. When the list counts in the currency your buyers pay in, the price stays where you put it, whatever the exchange rate does afterwards. When it counts in another one, for example a euro price list for buyers who pay in dollars, Shopify converts it for them every day: their price moves with the rate although nobody changed it.

• You work one market at a time, so you never see France, the UK, the US and Germany side by side for the same product.
• Nothing shows the margin you keep in each country once VAT and your sourcing cost are taken into account.
• A custom price set months ago keeps its number while the exchange rate erodes what it is worth to you.
• A price edited by a colleague, another app or an import leaves no signal anywhere.

A spreadsheet fixes the first point for an afternoon, and goes stale the moment it is exported.

In the PriceMaestro table every product has one row and every market two columns, the price and the crossed-out price. An icon on each cell says which kind of price it is: a pin for a custom price, sync arrows for a price that follows your base price, a lock when the market has no custom prices enabled yet. Enabling them for a market is one click, and it creates the price list Shopify needs.

The choice is reversible. Follow base price removes the custom price so the market follows your base price again.

The quickest way to price a new market is to copy one you already trust. Pick the source and the target market; the conversion factor is pre-filled from today's European Central Bank rate and you can change it. Choose the rounding, to .99, .95 or whole numbers, and look at the preview before anything is applied.

Bulk edits work the same way: increase, decrease or set, by percentage or amount, in one market or across several. Everything you do is a pending change. Nothing reaches Shopify until you review and publish, and a publication can be undone in one click.

Enter a sourcing cost per variant, in the currency you buy in. The table then shows the margin per country after VAT, next to the price you are about to change, computed the same way on every screen and in every email.

Set a minimum margin per market and it becomes a floor: a price under it, or under cost, is refused when you publish. An editor or above can go ahead by ticking an acknowledgement, which is recorded with their name for two years. A raise that stays under the minimum but above cost goes through, and Home keeps showing it until it is back above the minimum.

• Exchange rates. A custom price in pounds set in March is worth a different amount in euros in September. Analytics measures the drift from the day each price was set.
• Prices changed outside the app. Every day the app compares your store's prices with what it last recorded and lists what moved in History.
• Margins under your floor, because a cost went up or a rate went down.

All three are summarised in one email every Monday. The subject line counts what needs you, and a quiet week reads as a quiet week. The app never reprices on its own: it tells you, and you decide.

Four roles, owner, admin, editor and viewer. With approvals turned on, an editor proposes changes or a promotion and an admin approves or rejects them with a comment; the rule is enforced at the server. Every publication is recorded with who published it and when, History goes back two years per market, and the export gives an auditor the previous price, the new price and the person.