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 first-time 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.

Before You Begin

Please keep the following in mind before enabling domain or subfolder redirection:

• SEO Impact: Enabling automatic redirection may lead to incorrect website crawling by search engines, potentially affecting your SEO performance and data accuracy. 
  

  Note: If you want to maintain SEO accuracy while still offering a localized experience, we recommend using the free Geolocation Redirects app for redirection settings.

• First-Time Visitors Only: This feature primarily applies to first-time visitors. If a customer has previously visited your site and cookies are already stored in their browser, redirection behavior may not follow the configured rules.

Enabling Domain/Subfolder Redirection

To enable domain and subfolder redirection, follow these steps:

1. From your SHOPLINE admin panel, go to Settings > Markets and click Preferences.

   

2. In the Domains section, check Domain/subfolder redirection.

   

3. 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. 

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.

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.

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