How to Profit When Shopify Expands into a New Country
Shopify Growth Market Guide
What Is a Growth Market?
A Growth Market = a country where:
Current Shopify Market Share
To understand where the opportunity lies, you first need context:
How big is Shopify globally, and how uneven is adoption across countries?
The Growth Market Cycle
This pattern repeats in almost every country.
We've seen it:
Markets move in predictable phases.
Phase 1 – Skepticism
Magento and custom platforms dominate.
Large brands don't trust Shopify yet:
This is where most developers ignore the market, but this is where positioning is cheapest.
There are almost no serious local agencies, very little educational content, and low competition.
- Market education (pricing, features, enterprise capabilities)
- Implementation (actual store builds & migrations)
- As many case studies as possible
Phase 2 – First Serious Case Studies
Perception shifts from:
To:
This is the turning point.
The market starts to realize that Shopify can handle complex business logic and legal compliance in this new market.
Partners who:
Benefit from Shopify's growing reach.
Early Partners often:
Phase 3 – Acceleration
The cycle compounds:
Shopify becomes accepted.
Early movers already have case studies, authority, SEO presence, and pricing power.
The Arbitrage Strategy for Developers and Agencies
I'll make this as simple as possible:
Just copy from markets that are 2 years ahead.
Start by finding the top agencies in those countries and make a list.
Then reverse engineer:
Here are some ideas:
For instance, almost all successful German agencies rank for keywords like:
(of course all in local language)
In new countries, those will be the first question that merchants will have.
Look at top performing English content and adapt it to your market.
YouTube Videos, LinkedIn, X, Blog…
Don't re-invent. Just localize.
This is a huge step for building authority.
If you're working on a budget, start small. Organize a meetup of 5-10 people at some local bar.
If you can invest a bit, cheap options include co-working spaces / conference rooms.
And if you already have an office, invite people there.
Even if just 10 people show up, you can take cool photos and talk about it on social media.
Look at service offerings on freelance platforms.
Look at their websites.
Get out of your comfort zone: Fill out the contact forms to see what emails they send you or how they follow up with leads.
You can even hop on discovery calls to reverse engineer their sales process. (Pricing, Offers…)
In Growth Markets, Shopify's sales teams are actively looking for reliable implementation partners.
If you deliver consistently, you can become the agency they recommend when new leads enter the pipeline.
Case Study: Portugal
Portugal is currently moving through the Growth Market cycle.
Helder and his agency Skrey are playing this extremely well right now.
They:
As perception shifts in Portugal, Skrey is already established and benefiting from the acceleration.
If you want to see how Helder is thinking about this strategically, and how you can too:
Want to Move Faster?
Everything in this guide becomes easier with AI.
Finding markets, analyzing competitors, building localized storefronts. All of it can be done in a fraction of the time if you know how to use AI tools properly.
That and more is exactly what the AI Shopify Developer Bootcamp teaches. AI-native Shopify development, applied to real client work.
Learn More →