Selling internationally from India with Shopify Markets

You can sell to the US, UK, UAE, and beyond from a single Indian Shopify store using Shopify Markets — it handles multiple currencies, languages, domains, duties, and per-market pricing without a second store. The harder half is the India side: an IEC, an LUT so your exports are zero-rated under GST, an AD code for forex, and cross-border shipping — get those right and Markets does the rest.

I build and scale Shopify Plus stores from Delhi/NCR for Indian D2C brands exporting to the US, UK, and UAE — solo, no agency layer, working directly with the founder. This is the guide I wish existed when a brand asks me "can we just sell abroad from our current store?" The answer is yes. But the export paperwork, not the technology, is what trips up most launches — so this post covers both halves honestly.

Do you need a separate store to sell abroad?

No — and you should actively avoid it. The instinct is to spin up a "yourbrand.com/us" store or a second Shopify account for international. That fragments your catalog, inventory, analytics, customer accounts, and every future edit across two admins. You end up maintaining two of everything.

Shopify Markets is built precisely so you don't have to. One store, one catalog, one admin — with a configuration layer on top that presents the right currency, language, price, and payment methods to each country. For an Indian D2C brand testing international demand, that single-store architecture is almost always correct. You expand markets by adding configuration, not by cloning your business.

What can Shopify Markets actually do?

Markets is a set of controls that localize the buying experience per country. Here is what each piece does and where it lives on the plan ladder:

The headline: the core of Markets is on every plan, so you can start exporting without upgrading. Plus unlocks the advanced controls — per-market catalogs, granular duties, and B2B — that a serious international operation eventually needs. If you're weighing that upgrade, see Shopify Plus vs Basic Shopify for Indian D2C brands.

What do you need on the India side to export legally?

This is the part global Shopify guides skip entirely, and it's where Indian brands actually get stuck. Selling abroad from India is an export, and exports have compliance requirements that have nothing to do with Shopify. Treat this as a checklist to start early, in parallel with the store build:

A few honest notes. Exports are zero-rated under GST — meaning you generally don't charge IGST on an export sale when you've filed an LUT — but the mechanics matter and change, so run your specific setup past a CA. The IEC is a one-time registration linked to your PAN. The AD code has to be registered at each port you ship from. None of this is hard, but it takes calendar time because it depends on your bank and your CA, not on you — which is why it's usually the longer pole in an international launch, not the store work.

How do payments and forex work when you sell from India?

Here's the constraint that surprises people: Shopify Payments is not available in India, so you can't use Shopify's built-in international card processing. You accept foreign cards through a third-party gateway instead. The realistic options:

• Razorpay international — enables foreign card acceptance on an Indian entity, with settlement in INR. Simplest if you're an Indian company.
• PayPal — widely trusted in the US/UK/EU, straightforward to add as an additional method, with its own forex and fee structure.
• Foreign entity + Stripe — if you incorporate abroad (US LLC, UK Ltd, UAE), you can use Stripe and settle locally. This is a bigger commitment but gives the cleanest international checkout and pricing.

Which you choose depends on your target markets and how you want money to land. Many Indian D2C brands start with Razorpay international plus PayPal, then set up a foreign entity once international revenue justifies the overhead. Whatever you pick, confirm the forex conversion, settlement timeline, and per-transaction fees — those quietly eat international margin if you don't price for them.

Who should pay the duties — you or the customer?

Every cross-border order can incur import duty and taxes at the destination. Someone pays. Your two models:

• DDP (Delivered Duty Paid): you estimate and collect duties at checkout, so the customer owes nothing on delivery. Best experience by far — no nasty surprise, fewer refused parcels, fewer support tickets.
• DDU / DAP (Delivered Duty Unpaid): the courier collects duty from the customer before releasing the parcel. Cheaper to set up, but the surprise bill at the door is a top cause of refused international deliveries and one-star reviews.

For D2C, DDP almost always wins, even though it takes more setup. A refused DDU parcel costs you the product, the outbound freight, and the return freight — far more than the effort of collecting duties cleanly at checkout. Build the estimated landed cost into your international prices so DDP doesn't quietly erase your margin.

How should you price for international markets?

Pricing is where most Indian brands quietly lose their international margin, and it's not a Shopify setting — it's a decision. Three things have to be true at once: the price has to cover your true landed cost, it has to look intentional in the local market, and it has to protect your positioning.

Start from landed cost, not product cost. Your international price has to absorb the product, international freight, duties (if you're doing DDP), payment-gateway forex and fees, and a returns buffer. A tee that costs you ₹400 to make and sells for ₹1,299 in India does not become $16 abroad — after freight and duties, that leaves nothing. Work backwards from the delivered price a US or UK customer will happily pay, then check the margin survives.

Then make the number look native. Turn on Shopify's price rounding so a converted price lands on a clean local point — $24.00, £19.00, AED 89 — instead of a machine-translated $23.87. Rounded prices read as a deliberate international price; raw conversions read as an Indian store guessing. Where it matters, set manual per-market prices rather than trusting auto-conversion at all.

Finally, don't undercut yourself. Pricing your US storefront far below comparable local brands to "win on price" trains customers to see you as cheap and destroys margin on the orders that cost you the most to fulfil. Price for the value and the market, not for the exchange rate. Advanced per-market price lists — the kind that make this clean at scale — are a Shopify Plus capability, which is one more reason brands serious about international eventually move up.

How do international returns and refunds work?

Returns are the half of cross-border that founders forget until the first one lands. Shipping a parcel back from the US to India is slow and expensive — often more than the item is worth — so your India returns policy cannot simply be copy-pasted onto international orders.

The practical playbook D2C brands use: for low-value items, offer a refund or replacement without requiring the product back — eating the item is cheaper than paying reverse international freight and re-importing it (which triggers customs again). For higher-value items, use a returns solution or a local returns address in-market so the customer isn't shipping internationally. Either way, write a separate, explicit international returns policy so expectations are set before the sale, and price a small returns buffer into every international order. Getting this wrong is a fast way to turn profitable international revenue into a support-and-logistics drain.

How do you set up Shopify Markets, step by step?

The full sequence is in the how-to above, but the shape is: get the export paperwork moving, enable Markets, add each target country, set currencies and rounded per-market pricing, add languages and market domains, configure duties and cross-border shipping, wire up international payment methods, then test every market's checkout before you launch. Launch to one or two countries first and watch the first real shipments through customs — that's where the landed-cost math gets stress-tested.

Is Markets on Basic, or do you need Plus?

You can start international selling on your current plan — the currency, language, and domain controls that cover most brands' first phase are available everywhere. You reach for Shopify Plus when you need per-market product catalogs and pricing, tighter control over duties and taxes, a B2B channel running alongside your D2C storefront, or deeper checkout customization for international flows. That's the same threshold logic covered in when to upgrade to Shopify Plus: upgrade when a capability you actually need is locked behind the tier, not before. If and when you do move, that's the kind of build I handle as a Shopify Plus developer.

How much does it cost to build an international store?

For an Indian D2C brand, the honest ranges:

• Full Plus stack adding Wholesale + Markets together: ₹8,00,000 – ₹12,00,000. This is the "we're going B2B and international at the same time" build.
• Focused Shopify Functions engagement: ₹1,50,000 – ₹4,00,000 — e.g. custom international shipping logic or duty rules on an existing Plus store.
• Plus retainer for ongoing work: ₹65,000 – ₹1,20,000/month — Flow tuning, Functions iteration, and market expansion after launch.

The store build is only part of the total, of course — factor in your export registrations, courier onboarding, and the working capital to hold international inventory or absorb duties. But the development itself is a known, fixed-scope number, not a mystery.

Common mistakes Indian brands make going international

• Starting the store build before the paperwork. The IEC, LUT, and AD code take calendar time. Start them first, or your finished store sits idle waiting on your bank.
• Pricing by raw conversion. A straight ₹→$ conversion looks amateur and ignores duties and freight. Set intentional, rounded, margin-safe per-market prices.
• Choosing DDU to save setup effort. You pay for it in refused parcels and returns. DDP is worth the work.
• Launching to ten countries at once. You can't watch ten customs pipelines. Start with one or two, learn, then expand.
• Ignoring per-market payment expectations. US buyers want cards and PayPal; the UAE and parts of Europe have their own preferences. Match the methods to the market.

What's next

If you're an Indian D2C brand ready to sell to the US, UK, or UAE and you want the store and the export side set up correctly the first time, that's exactly the work I do — solo, senior, no agency layer. On the Shopify Plus developer page you'll find transparent pricing, named case studies (Mahina's +28% AOV, Bloom's +22% MoM revenue), and a 30-minute call link. Tell me your target markets, your catalog, and where you are on the export paperwork, and I'll map out exactly what your international launch needs — and honestly whether you need Plus for it yet or can start on your current plan.

Related reads:

• Shopify Plus vs Basic Shopify for Indian D2C brands — which plan you actually need to start.
• When should you upgrade to Shopify Plus? — the thresholds where Plus starts to pay for itself.

Sources:

• Shopify Markets — official overview
• Shopify Help Center — Markets
• DGFT — Directorate General of Foreign Trade (IEC)
• GST portal — Letter of Undertaking (LUT)