Redirecting Customers to the Right Market Automatically
After setting up domains for your global markets, you can enhance the customer experience by enabling domain and subfolder redirection. This feature automatically directs visitors to the appropriate regional domain or subfolder based on their geographic location, ensuring they see the localized language, currency, and product availability for their market.
Enabling Domain/Subfolder Redirection
To enable domain and subfolder redirection, follow these steps:
- From your SHOPLINE admin panel, go to Settings > Markets and click Preferences.
- In the Domains section, check Domain/subfolder redirection.
- Click Update to save your changes.
To give customers more flexibility, you can add a country/region selector to your online store through the theme editor. This allows customers to manually choose their preferred language and currency.
If your theme doesn’t support this feature, consider installing the free Geolocation Redirects app to enable this functionality.
Redirects for Markets with Dedicated Domains
If you’ve set up separate domains, subdomains, or subfolders for different markets, enabling the Domain/subfolder redirection feature will automatically direct visitors to the corresponding domain or subfolder for their location.
For example, if you use ".com" for the US market and ".uk" for the UK market, a UK visitor accessing the ".com" domain will be redirected to the ".uk" site.
Note: When the automatic redirection is enabled, your store will use temporary 302 redirects between URLs. These allow search engines to discover and index all your store URLs. |
Redirects for Markets with a Shared Domain
If you have set up your online store’s markets to share a domain, for example, by configuring non-primary markets to use the primary domain, enabling domain and subfolder redirection automatically detects a customer's location and adjusts the page content, such as products, currency, and language, to match their market.
For example, if your primary market is the US and uses USD on "yourstore.com," and your UK market shares the same domain but displays prices in GBP, a customer in the UK who visits "yourstore.com" will automatically see prices in GBP.
Note: Search engines will not index the content of markets that share the same domain. |
Redirection Rules for EU Countries/Regions
To comply with local regulations, customers in EU countries visiting your store via a country code top-level domain (ccTLD) will not be automatically redirected. This ensures that EU customers can access their localized stores directly. However, if the market uses a non-EU ccTLD (such as .com or .shop), redirection is allowed.
Examples:
- If you use the ".de" TLD for Germany and the ".fr" TLD for France, a French customer visiting the ".de" site will not be automatically redirected to ".fr".
- If you use ".com/de-de" for Germany and ".com/fr-fr" for France, a French customer visiting ".com/de-de" will be redirected to ".com/fr-fr".
List of EU Countries/Regions and Their ccTLDs
Country/Region | ccTLD | Country/Region | ccTLD |
Austria | .at | Italy | .it |
Belgium | .be | Latvia | .lv |
Bulgaria | .bg | Lithuania | .lt |
Croatia | .hr | Luxembourg | .lu |
Cyprus | .cy | Malta | .mt |
Czech Republic | .cz | Netherlands | .nl |
Denmark | .dk | Poland | .pl |
Estonia | .ee | Portugal | .pt |
Finland | .fi | Romania | .ro |
France | .fr | Slovakia | .sk |
Germany | .de | Slovenia | .si |
Greece | .gr | Spain | .es |
Hungary | .hu | Sweden | .se |
Ireland | .ie | European Union | .eu |