Pricing zones are a powerful tool for managing and applying a consistent pricing strategy across multiple countries simultaneously. This feature simplifies setting and updating prices for various international markets, providing a seamless and efficient user experience.
How Pricing Zones Work
Pricing zones allow you to set pricing settings once on the Pricing Zones page, select the countries you want these settings to apply to, and then create the zone. This approach eliminates the need to update pricing settings for each country individually, significantly reducing the complexity and time required to manage international pricing.
Pricing Coefficients
Pricing coefficients enable merchants to apply a percentage-based increase or decrease to all products sold within the countries of a pricing zone. For example, if a pricing coefficient is set to an increase of 5%, all customers shopping from the countries within this zone will see product prices that are 5% higher than the domestic prices. The new product prices, including the coefficient adjustment, are used for tax calculations at checkout. For instance, if a product's domestic price is $100 and the coefficient increases it to $105, taxes will be calculated based on the $105 price.
VAT-Inclusive Pricing
VAT-inclusive pricing allows you to include the value-added tax (VAT) in the product prices displayed on the storefront. This feature ensures that customers see the final price they will pay, including VAT, improving transparency and potentially improving the shopping experience.
Limitations
The Pricing Zones feature relies on Shopify Markets to generate country-specific price lists on your Shopify store. Each time a price change is made for a country on the Swap dashboard, an individual Shopify market with the requested settings is created. However, there are limitations due to the number of Shopify markets that can be created per store, which varies depending on the Shopify plan.
According to Shopify’s Markets documentation, adding Shopify markets is restricted to stores on the Advanced or Plus plans. Additionally, these stores can only have a maximum of 50 markets. This limitation means that the Pricing Zones feature is only available to merchants on these specific Shopify plans.
As pricing zones use the Shopify Markets feature, the number of countries you can add to your pricing zones is limited to the number of markets already in use. If 3 markets are currently in use, you can add 47 countries to pricing zones.
When adding multiple countries to a single pricing zone in Shopify, each country will still be treated as a separate market. We need to differentiate markets based on VAT and coefficient adjustments. For instance, if you increase prices by 5% and add VAT, a country with 17% VAT will have one price, while a country with 18% VAT will have a different price.
Although future updates may allow grouping countries based on total price adjustments, the current setup maintains each country as its own market.
Creating Pricing Zones
To create a new pricing zone, follow this guide.