Case study · Commerce

12 markets → one Shopify Markets store

Twelve separate storefronts were fast to launch and expensive to run. Consolidating them into a single Markets store took about three months and removed most of the operational cost of selling across Europe.

How it got to twelve

Corston expanded across Europe one market at a time, and at each step a separate Shopify store was the fastest way to get selling: local content, local pricing and VAT treatment, local shipping and payment methods, correct hreflang. That decision was right at the time and wrong cumulatively. Twelve stores means twelve theme deploys, twelve content updates, twelve places for a change to be applied inconsistently, and twelve chances to get regional compliance subtly wrong — including EU withdrawal-right flows, which had to be correct in twelve languages.

The consolidation

• Pricing and VAT per market moved into Shopify Markets rather than being a property of which store you happened to land on.
• Content and navigation per market driven by metafields, so one theme could express twelve regional experiences without twelve codebases.
• Translations across 12 languages consolidated into the single store's translation layer.
• Sitemaps and redirect mapping — the part that decides whether you keep your search rankings or donate them. Legacy domains 301'd to their market equivalents.
• Market-level reporting preserved through the merge, so the commercial team didn't lose the ability to see performance by region.

What made it hard

Redirects. Everything else was a migration with a checklist; the redirect mapping was the piece where a mistake is invisible on launch day and shows up six weeks later as a traffic decline nobody can attribute. Twelve domains' worth of URL structures had to map onto one, including the URLs that didn't have an equivalent and needed a judgement call rather than a rule.

The second hard part was sequencing. There's no version of this where you take the storefronts offline, so each market had to move while continuing to trade.

Outcome

• One store to maintain instead of twelve; a theme change now ships once.
• Fewer content and release inconsistencies between markets.
• SEO equity preserved through the redirect layer; market-level reporting intact.

Shopify Plus, Markets, Liquid, metafields, translations, GA4, DNS and redirects.