Shopify Markets Multi-Currency: How Prices Are Converted, What It Costs and How a Canadian Store Gets Paid

Shopify separates three currencies. The store currency is the one you set prices in and see in reports. The local, or presentment, currency is what a customer sees and pays at checkout. The payout currency is what lands in your bank account. Most multi-currency surprises come from treating these as one thing.

By default, a price in a local currency is calculated as product price × exchange rate × (1 + conversion fee), and rounding is applied afterwards if you turned it on. Shopify's own example uses a US store: a US$10.00 product becomes €8.81 at a rate of 0.867519 with the 1.5% fee, and €8.85 once rounding is active. The rate is the one at the moment of the transaction, so the same product shows a slightly different price from week to week.

Shopify describes the rate itself as a mid-market rate without markup. The cost sits in the conversion fee, which is the number to compare against any other way of selling abroad.

The conversion fee depends on the country your store is based in, not on where the customer lives. Shopify lists 1.5% for stores in the United States and 2% for France and all other Shopify Payments regions, which includes Canada. It applies whether you use automatic or manual exchange rates. PayPal wallet payments through Shopify Payments carry a 3% conversion fee in the United States and France and are not offered elsewhere.

Refunds are where the fee shows up a second time in your margins. Shopify does not return the conversion fee or the card fee when you refund an order, although it does not charge an additional conversion fee on the refund or on a chargeback. Because the refund is converted at the rate on the day of the refund, the amount you get back in your own currency rarely matches what you received. Shopify recommends refunding the full amount the customer paid in their currency and accepting the gain or loss.

Two smaller items belong in the same budget line. If you capture payments manually, for example after confirming stock, the rate is fixed at capture rather than at order, so the order total in your admin is an estimate until then. And for multi-currency subscriptions, the rate is locked to the customer's first order, which protects the customer but leaves you exposed if the currency moves over a long subscription.

Shopify's guidelines for selling in local currencies set the boundaries. The ones that most often change a project plan are below.

Shopify gives you four levers, and they stack in a set order. Fixed prices you set for a product in a market always win. Below that, a market can use a manual exchange rate or the automatic one, and a percentage adjustment can raise or lower everything in that market's catalog. Shopify's example: a US$20.00 product with a manual rate of 1.3 and a 20% adjustment becomes C$32.00. Manual rates have limits of their own: they cannot be used on your primary market, they apply only to single-country markets or to multi-country markets with local currencies turned off, and Shopify's exchange-rate article presents them as part of Managed Markets.

We use a simple rule when planning international stores: let the exchange rate set prices where volume is small and you are still testing demand, and set fixed prices where the market matters enough that a price ending in .37 or a weekly price change would look careless. Fixed prices take more work, since someone has to review them when costs or exchange rates move, but they are also what you will want for paid ads and price-comparison feeds, where the price shown has to stay put.

Canadian shoppers are used to seeing sales tax added at checkout, but many markets expect it inside the price. Shopify's dynamic tax-inclusive pricing shows prices with local tax in regions that use tax-inclusive pricing, including Japan, the United Kingdom, most of Europe and Australia, and without tax elsewhere. In Shopify's example, a US$100 price with a 10% home tax becomes US$90.91 before tax and US$109.09 for a UK customer with 20% VAT. It requires tax collection to be set up for that country, it does not adjust shipping rates, and it does not change fixed prices you set by hand, so those must already be the exact amount you want to charge.

Japan is worth special care. Japanese businesses must show consumption-tax-inclusive prices to consumers, in forms such as ¥11,000 or ¥11,000 (tax included), so a tax-exclusive price looks out of place to Japanese shoppers. If you are not collecting Japanese consumption tax, state clearly on the product page and at checkout whether duty or tax is due on delivery, and set yen prices that end where you want them; yen prices have no decimals, so a converted ¥4,873 stands out.

Selling in US dollars does not mean being paid in US dollars. Without a matching bank account, every USD order is converted to CAD and the 2% conversion fee applies. Multi-Currency Payouts are available only on Advanced and Shopify Plus, and for a store based in Canada the only extra payout currency is USD. The USD account can be in Canada or the United States; the CAD account must be in Canada.

A USD payout is not free either. Payouts in a non-domestic currency cost 1.5% on Advanced and 1.25% on Plus for Canadian stores, charged on the payout currency whether or not a conversion happened. On US$100,000 of sales, that is US$1,500 or US$1,250 against US$2,000 in conversion fees. Shopify's page also says Basic and Grow stores in Canada can choose USD as their default payout currency, with a 1.5% payout fee. The real benefit comes when you also spend in US dollars, for example on US suppliers, ads billed in USD or a US warehouse, because then the money never has to be converted at all.

Plan the bank setup early. Shopify allows one account per payout currency, and adding or replacing an account more than 24 hours after setup pauses all payouts for 3 to 5 business days. Refunds and chargebacks follow the original order's currency and are taken from your default account, with a conversion fee, if you have no account in that currency.

This is the order we work through when adding currencies to an existing Shopify store.