Your Shopify store is set up for Canada and Australia. Shopify Markets is on, local currencies are ticked, the country selector sits neatly in the footer. Job done?

Not quite. The only way to know what a shopper in Toronto or Sydney actually sees is to visit the store as one of them. From your desk in Manchester, you can’t. Your IP says UK, so Shopify shows you pounds, and every assumption you make from there is a guess.

This is a walkthrough of how to stop guessing. Two pretend shoppers, two cities, one afternoon of testing.

Priya is in Toronto. She lands on your product page from an Instagram ad, expects to see Canadian dollars, and wants the number at checkout to match the number she saw on the product page. Three quarters of Canadians bought goods online in 2020, and more than two thirds of them ran into some kind of problem while ordering. Priya has little patience left for a store that gets the basics wrong.

Liam is in Sydney. Online shopping is now 12.7% of retail turnover in Australia, so Liam buys from overseas stores often enough to spot an unconverted price in a second. If he sees USD or GBP, he assumes customs charges are coming and closes the tab.

Both of them should see a store that looks local from the first pixel. Your job is to prove it does.

Shopify works out where a visitor is from their IP address. So to see the store the way Priya sees it, your browser has to arrive from a Canadian IP. Not a data centre in Montreal, either. Shopify, Cloudflare and most fraud filters can tell the difference between a server and a household, and some will behave differently for each.

That is the whole reason residential proxies exist. You route your traffic through a real home connection in the city you want to test, and the store treats you as a local shopper. Pick Toronto, load the homepage, and the currency you get is the one Priya gets. Switch to Sydney, reload in a fresh private window, and you’re Liam.

Two practical notes before you start.

First, use a private window and clear it between cities. Shopify stores your market choice in a cookie, so if you test Toronto and then jump to Sydney without clearing, you’ll still see Canadian dollars and wrongly conclude the detection is broken.

Second, test on mobile too. Set the proxy on your phone or use the browser’s device emulation. The footer selector that is obvious on desktop often ends up buried under three taps on a small screen.

Work through the store in the order a shopper would. Don’t skip to checkout.

Homepage. Did the currency switch on arrival, or did you get a popup asking to confirm? Either is fine, as long as it happened. If you’re on pounds, the market isn’t matched to the country, and that is the first thing to fix.

Product page. Look at the price endings. Shopify converts prices by multiplying your base price by the exchange rate, adding its conversion fee, and then applying rounding if you’ve turned it on. The Shopify help docs walk through the maths, but the short version is that a tidy £29 can land as CA$52.37 unless rounding is active. Priya won’t trust a price that looks like a calculator spat it out.

Cart. Add two items and change a quantity. The totals should stay in local currency and the subtotal should add up. Discount codes are worth a go here too, because a fixed-amount code set in pounds can behave oddly once converted.

Checkout. This is where most stores quietly fail. Local currency at checkout only works if Shopify Payments is your primary gateway. With another provider, the storefront shows dollars but the customer is charged in your store currency, and their bank adds a fee on top. Liam sees AU79ontheproductpageandAU84 on his statement, and he remembers that.

Shipping and tax. Enter a Toronto postcode, then a Sydney one. Check the shipping options are the ones you set for each market and that tax is shown the way local shoppers expect, inclusive for Australia and added on for Canada.

The currency itself is rarely the bug. It’s the edges around it.

Hidden costs at the last step. Baymard’s research puts unexpected extra costs at the top of the list of checkout abandonment reasons, cited by close to half of shoppers who weren’t just browsing. A currency that changes between cart and checkout is exactly that kind of surprise.

Mixed signals. Priya is in Toronto but shipping a gift to a friend in Vancouver. Fine. Priya is in Toronto but shipping to Melbourne? Shopify will switch her to the Australian market at checkout based on the shipping address, and the price will jump. Decide whether that is the behaviour you want, and if it is, make sure the change is clearly explained rather than silent.

Search engines seeing the wrong version. Google crawls mostly from US IPs, so if your Canadian pricing only appears based on location detection, Google may never see it. Shopify Markets handles this with separate subfolders and hreflang tags, but only if you have them switched on. Check that /en-ca/ and /en-au/ exist and load correctly from a UK connection as well as a local one.