Integrations · Shopify
Your best margin in Europe is the store you already own.
Every marketplace sale you make in Europe rents you a customer. Your Shopify store keeps them. What stops most US brands from selling direct across the UK and Europe is not the storefront, it is everything a European shopper quietly expects behind it: a local payment method, a delivery date they believe, a return address in their own country, and a product page that meets the rules of the market they are in. Connect Shopify to Expandly and that becomes our job rather than a replatform.
Where we stand with Shopify
Our own Shopify integration, built and maintained
Not a generic connector or a middleware subscription sitting between us. We build and maintain the Shopify integration ourselves, and it has run in production for years across brands selling in multiple markets. You authorise the app from your own myshopify address. No theme work, no developer sprint, no migration.
Your storefront stays yours
Expandly sits behind the store, holding stock, orders, listings and compliance. Your brand, your theme and your customer relationship are untouched.
One pool with your marketplaces
Shopify orders draw on the same European inventory as your Amazon, bol.com and eBay orders, so you stop holding separate buffers for separate places.
The opportunity
Selling direct in Europe pays better. It also asks more of you.
On your own store you keep the margin a marketplace takes, you keep the customer data, and you decide what the second purchase looks like. That is why brands with a European marketplace presence almost always want a European store next. The economics are simply better on the channel you control.
The catch is that a marketplace hides a lot of local work from you. It supplies the payment methods, the returns policy, the language, the trust and the legal furniture on the product page. Take those away and you are responsible for all of it, in three markets that behave nothing like the US.
Payment is the clearest example. Cards are not how Germany buys online: PayPal carries 28.5%, invoice payment through Klarna and similar carries 25.8%, direct debit another 17.3%, and credit and debit cards together sit at 12.3%. Invoice payment means the customer receives the goods and pays two or four weeks later. In the Netherlands, iDEAL carries 71% of online payments. A checkout built for a US shopper is not a soft loss in these markets, it is most of the market.
The same pattern repeats with every market you add. Poland runs on BLIK and Przelewy24, Belgium on Bancontact, Spain on Bizum, France on Cartes Bancaires. Two of the markets you are most likely to want next are not even inside the euro. None of this is difficult once. It is simply work that has to be done again per market, in the local language and the local currency, and that is the argument for running it through one system rather than one project at a time.
71%
Of Dutch online payments run through iDEAL
82%
Of German shoppers regularly abandon an order when their preferred payment method is missing
74%
Of UK shoppers abandon over unexpected shipping costs
Two ways to run it
Alongside your store, or the system your store runs on
Brands come to us at different stages, and the integration does two quite different jobs depending on which one you are at. You do not have to decide on day one, and moving between them costs nothing.
Shopify stays the shop. We run Europe behind it.
Your store carries on exactly as it does today and your team keeps working in Shopify admin. Expandly handles the European side out of sight, and the European operation stops being anybody’s side project.
Stock held in region, orders picked and shipped locally
VAT, producer responsibility and product requirements registered and filed
European listings and translations published from one catalogue
Fulfilment status and tracking flowing back into your store automatically
Expandly becomes the layer everything runs on.
One catalogue, one stock pool and one order queue across your store and every marketplace, your home market included. Your team works in Expandly and Shopify becomes one of the storefronts drawing on it. This is where multi-channel brands tend to arrive, because the alternative is reconciling by hand.
Every channel and every country in one place, US channels included
Order rules routing work to the right warehouse without being asked
Purchase orders, suppliers and stock takes handled in the same system
Reporting and accounting built on one set of numbers
Same integration either way. The difference is how much of your operation you want to stop running in spreadsheets.
Market by market
What "local" actually means where you are going
Europe is not one market and a European store is not one build. This is the practical shape of it across the markets US brands ask us about most. The UK, Netherlands and Germany are in the base package, and the rest are added as you want them.
Market
Checkout essentials
Storefront language
Currency
United Kingdom Base
Debit cards lead at 53%, with PayPal and rising buy-now-pay-later
English
GBP
Germany Base
PayPal 28.5%, invoice payment 25.8%, direct debit 17.3%, cards 12.3% combined
German
EUR
Netherlands Base
iDEAL carries 71% of online payments
Dutch
EUR
France
Cards, notably Cartes Bancaires, alongside PayPal
French
EUR
Spain
Cards and PayPal, with Bizum widely used
Spanish
EUR
Italy
Cards and PayPal, with local wallets growing
Italian
EUR
Belgium
Bancontact is the domestic scheme
Dutch and French
EUR
Poland
BLIK and Przelewy24
Polish
PLN
Sweden
Swish, and invoice payment through Klarna
Swedish
SEK
Ireland
Cards and PayPal
English
EUR
Two things worth reading off this table. Belgium needs two languages rather than one, so it is a heavier content job than its size suggests. And Poland and Sweden are inside the EU but outside the euro, which means real currency handling rather than a display conversion, and it changes how your pricing and your margin behave. Payment shares for the UK, Germany and the Netherlands come from our Country Data Hub entries; for the remaining markets the dominant methods are named without shares, and we will give you the current figures for any market you are seriously considering.
The integration
What moves, and where it starts
Worth being precise about, because it decides where your team does its work each morning. Orders come to you. Stock and product content go out from one place. Nothing needs entering twice.
Direction
What happens
Orders
New orders fetch automatically once connected, so your European store and your marketplaces land in the same queue.
Fulfilment status and tracking
When an order ships from our warehouse, the status and the tracking number go back to Shopify, and your customer gets the notification your store normally sends.
Stock levels
Live Inventory updates your Shopify quantities as orders land anywhere, matching on listing ID, SKU or title. One pool, every channel, no manual reconciliation.
Products and listings
Your catalogue is mastered in Expandly and published out. Change a price, a title or a translation once and it lands on Shopify and on every marketplace you sell through.
Store categories
Synced in at setup so products can be assigned to the categories your store already uses.
Order statuses
Your Shopify statuses are mapped to Expandly’s, one to one. The names do not have to match, and the mapping can be changed later.
Accounting
Shopify orders post to Xero on the mapping you choose, per currency and per payment method, with returns going across as credit notes.
Setup decisions we make with you rather than for you: how products merge across channels, which Shopify statuses map to which stage, and whether stock pushes go live immediately or after your first stock take. We normally hold the stock push back until your counts are confirmed, which avoids a bad number reaching a live storefront. Titles on Shopify listings run to 123 characters and descriptions publish as text, so those are set correctly at catalogue level rather than fixed later.
Selling direct in Europe
Six things your store has to get right
None of these are storefront design problems, which is why they tend to arrive late. Each one is either a conversion lever or a legal requirement, and several are both.
01
Payments
The methods people actually use
iDEAL in the Netherlands, PayPal and invoice payment in Germany, cards and rising BNPL in the UK. Invoice payment is the one US operators find hardest to accept, because the customer has your goods before you have their money, and in Germany it is a quarter of the market.
Local currency pricing sits alongside it. A German shopper looking at dollars is a shopper doing mental arithmetic instead of buying.
02
Pricing
How a discount has to be displayed
EU price indication rules measure a promotional price against the lowest price you charged in the previous 30 days. Shopify’s compare-at field does something different: it anchors against a list price. Run a US-style permanent compare-at across your European store and the saving you are showing is not the saving the rule recognises.
The fix is a pricing and promotions calendar that knows what the reference price is at any moment. That is a merchandising habit rather than a plugin.
03
Accessibility
Your storefront is in scope in Germany
Since 28 June 2025 the BFSG has required online shops serving German consumers to meet EN 301 549 and WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and to publish an accessibility statement in German. The micro-enterprise exemption covers businesses with fewer than 10 staff and turnover of at most €2m, so brands at the scale we work with are inside the scope rather than outside it.
This one lands squarely on the theme and the checkout, which is why it belongs in a build conversation and not a compliance one.
04
Returns
A statutory right, and a local address
EU consumers have a 14 day right to withdraw from an online purchase, and German shoppers expect returns to be free on top of that. German return rates are the highest in Europe and can pass 50% in fashion.
A return that crosses the Atlantic is usually worth less than the cost of moving it. A return to a European warehouse gets assessed, restocked or reworked, and stays inside its own customs territory. That is the difference between a returns policy you can afford and one you quietly hope nobody uses.
05
Product pages
Information that has to be on the page itself
European product safety rules require certain trader and product details to appear with the listing rather than in a policy page, and the language of the storefront is the language of the market. Dutch shoppers understand English perfectly well and still convert better in Dutch.
Your labels and your product pages have to agree with each other too, which is why label review sits upstream of listing work in our sequence.
06
Delivery
A date they believe, and no surprise at the door
Shipping cost is the single biggest cause of abandonment in the UK, and a customs charge collected on the doorstep is worse than a high shipping price at checkout because it arrives after the decision. Stock held in region removes the customs event from the customer’s experience entirely.
It also changes what you can promise. Next-day and two-day delivery are normal expectations in these markets, and they are only credible from local inventory.
What we handle
The work behind a European store
Your store is the part your customer sees. This is the part that makes it work, and it is the same work whether you sell on one channel or five.
Tax registered, filings running
VAT registration in every market you sell or store stock in, then ongoing filing from inside the platform. Producer responsibility registrations, label review, and Responsible Person appointment for the EU and separately for the UK.
Stock in region, orders shipping locally
Your inventory sits at our Netherlands warehouse for EU demand and our UK warehouses for UK demand. Shopify orders are picked, packed and dispatched locally, and returns come back to a local address.
Catalogue translated and published
Titles, descriptions and bullet points translated for German and Dutch shoppers, then published to your store and your marketplaces from one catalogue. A change is made once.
One set of numbers
Direct and marketplace performance side by side, with cost price in the report so you are reading contribution rather than revenue. Alerts on filing deadlines and stock events before they bite.
Where your store sits
Marketplaces buy you evidence. Your store buys you a business.
The sequence that works is rarely store-first. A marketplace listing tells you within a quarter which of your SKUs travel, what they can be priced at, and which market wants them most, and it does that without you paying to build an audience from nothing. That is expensive information bought cheaply.
Your own store is where that information gets turned into margin. Same stock, same compliance, same warehouse, better economics and a customer you can talk to again. The brands who get this right tend to run both at once rather than treating one as a graduation from the other, because the marketplace keeps feeding the store demand signals long after launch.
Which is why the foundation matters more than the channel. A VAT registration, a packaging registration and pallets in a European warehouse are not Shopify assets or Amazon assets. They are market access, and everything you plug in afterwards uses them.
Build the foundation once. Add channels for years.
Inside the platform
What your team stops doing by hand
Inventory
One number, everywhere
Stock updates across your store and every marketplace as orders land. Bundles and kits recalculate from component stock, and low stock thresholds are set per product so you hear about a gap with time to fix it.
Orders
Rules that act on import
Set conditions on channel, country, value, weight or product and the platform acts as orders arrive: routed to the right warehouse, put on the right pick list, labelled with the right carrier, status pushed back to your store.
Shipping
Carrier choice, order by order
A light repeat line and a heavy high-value one should not ship the same way or cost the same. Carriers are selected per order against the promise you made at checkout, with labels and tracking generated in the platform.
Finance
Straight into Xero
Orders, returns as credit notes and purchase orders post across on your own mapping, split by currency, payment method and channel. CSV export covers other packages.
Global Expansion Pathway™
Where your own store sits in the sequence
Direct selling is part of the Omni-Channel stage of the Global Expansion Pathway™, delivered as the E-commerce Expansion Multiplier™. It comes after Compliance and Logistics for a plain reason: your store is the only channel where nobody else absorbs your mistakes. A marketplace will suppress a non-compliant listing and hand you a warning. Your own storefront will keep taking orders you are not in a position to fulfil properly, and the first you hear of it is a chargeback or a customs hold. Get the two stages before it done and your store becomes the highest-margin channel you run.
The bigger picture
Anyone can open a European store in an afternoon. Very few can run one.
Shopify made the storefront the easy part, and that is exactly why it is not where the advantage lives. The brands taking real European DTC revenue are not the ones with better themes. They are the ones whose checkout offers iDEAL, whose delivery date is true because the stock is 200 kilometres away rather than 6,000, whose returns come back to a building in the same customs territory, and whose product pages satisfy the market they appear in. None of that is visible from the outside. All of it shows up in conversion rate and contribution margin.
• Local payment methods live at checkout, because iDEAL and invoice payment are not optional in their markets
• Delivery promises backed by stock in region, not by an optimistic transit estimate
• Returns processed locally, so a returns policy stays affordable enough to advertise
• Discount display that matches how the rules measure a saving, not how a US compare-at field works
• Accessibility handled in the theme, since German rules now reach the shop itself
• One catalogue behind your store and your marketplaces, changed once
We have taken more than 2,000 brands into new markets. The store is usually the channel they are most excited about and the last one that becomes ready, because it depends on everything else being right first.
The German checkout
PayPal at 28.5% and invoice payment at 25.8% against 12.3% for credit and debit cards combined. A card-only checkout meets a fraction of the market.
12.3%
Card share of German online payments
Accessibility, already live
The BFSG has applied to online shops serving German consumers since June 2025, at WCAG 2.1 Level AA with a German-language statement.
AA
WCAG 2.1 Level AA, EN 301 549
Returns reality
The statutory EU right to withdraw, before you add the free-returns expectation that German shoppers bring with them.
14 days
Right of withdrawal, all EU consumers
How we work together
Choose your level of support
Every tier gets the same platform, the same onboarding sequence and the same three base markets. What changes is how much of the work sits with you.
Expandly Self-Serve
With Email Support
£1,150 /month
Platform-led, with support when you need it.
✓ Full platform, UK, Netherlands and Germany, complete onboarding
✓ Wizards and knowledgebase to work each market yourself
✓ Email support when you get stuck
✓ Additional markets from £600 a month
Expandly Guided
With Account Manager Support
£3,000 /month
A dedicated expert alongside you through every stage.
✓ Dedicated onboarding manager, then a named success manager
✓ Quarterly business review and an annual compliance audit
✓ Warehouse tech fee included, preferential 3PL rates
✓ Additional markets from £400 a month
Expandly VIP
With VIP Consultant Support
£5,000 /month
Your own consultant. Senior, accountable, and in it with you.
✓ VIP onboarding consultant, then a VIP success consultant
✓ Monthly business reviews and an annual consultant visit
✓ Listings management and a tailored shipping plan
✓ Additional markets from £200 a month
All tiers: 36-month term. Base package includes the UK, Netherlands and Germany. Enterprise pricing is bespoke for high-volume, multi-market operators.
Questions
What Shopify merchants ask us
Do I need to replatform or rebuild my store?
No. You authorise the Expandly app from your existing myshopify address and your theme, checkout and content stay as they are. The work is behind the store rather than on it.
Should I run one store or a separate European one?
Both work and the answer depends on your brand, your pricing strategy and how different your European range is. It is worth deciding early, because it affects your catalogue structure and your tax reporting rather than just your URLs. Bring it to the review call and we will work through it with you.
Can I keep selling on Amazon at the same time?
Yes, and most brands do. Your store and your marketplaces draw on the same European stock and the same catalogue, which is the point. Adding a channel later is a listings exercise rather than a project.
Who handles the VAT on a direct sale?
You do, and we do it for you. On a marketplace sale the platform often collects and remits the VAT itself. Sell direct and that falls to your own registrations, which is one of the differences between the two channels that catches people out. We hold the registrations and file the returns from your order data.
How long does the integration itself take?
The connection is quick. What sets the timeline is the compliance work underneath it: Netherlands VAT runs three to four weeks, the UK around eleven, Germany 16 to 20 after a complete submission. Catalogue and listing work can run in parallel while those are in flight.
Find out what your European store needs
Thirty minutes on your markets, your categories and your current setup. You will leave knowing what has to be true before your store can trade properly in the UK and Europe, and how long each piece takes.
This page is general guidance and not advice on your brand’s specific position. Payment, consumer and accessibility requirements differ by market and change, and figures carry the year and scope they were measured on. Confirm anything platform-specific with Shopify, and talk to our compliance team about how the rules above apply to your products and markets before you make a filing, a registration or a launch decision.