NAVIGATION - Best practices and recommendations for language and country selectors

Shopify Markets allows you to easily translate your store into multiple languages, sell in different currencies, and set up different tax rates based on customers' location. This allows providing a fully localized version of your store to customers coming from different countries.

Here are our recommendations when it comes to showing selectors:

• Disable both the country and language selectors in the header.
• Enable both the country and language selectors in the footer.
• Install the free Geolocation app from Shopify (https://apps.shopify.com/geolocation)
• Recommended: create new markets that contain only one language applicable to it (for instance, if you target Japan, you should create a new Shopify Market for Japan, with a domain for Japan and the appropriate language and currencies; this way, you won't have to show English, French or whatever to a Japanese customer who will have no reason to use this). You can learn more about how to create a Shopify market by clicking here.

The reason we do not recommend having the selectors in the header is that they require significant space in the header. The header typically contains a lot of information such as logo, navigation, cart link... and can quickly become very crowded. Ideally, a customer should never have to directly interact with the localization selectors: instead, the customer should be automatically suggested the best choices in language and currency based on their geographical location. This is what the free Geolocation app from Shopify is doing.

Having the selectors in the footer (an area that is typically less crowded with important links) as a fallback allows your customers to eventually change their preferences in the future.

This setup provides the best combination of simplicity, by automatically suggesting to your customers the most appropriate experience, removing the frustration of your customers having to interact with different selectors, and keeping your header free of rarely used selectors so that they can focus on what matters the most in your store: your products.