Shopify Managed Markets, Spring '26 Checkout and Local Payment Methods: Your Complete Action Plan

Shopify's Spring '26 Edition, launched June 17, 2026 with 150+ updates, made three structural changes to cross-border selling: a redesigned checkout built for conversion on mobile, a new Managed Payment Methods feature that auto-activates local payment options by market, and a rebuilt Markets admin surface with parent/submarket inheritance. If you sell internationally, or plan to, these changes affect your checkout flow, your payment settings, and your admin architecture right now.

Key takeaways

• Shopify Spring '26 Edition (launched June 17, 2026) ships a redesigned checkout with managed payment method ordering and mixed ship-and-pickup in one cart.
• Managed Payment Methods, live from May 27, 2026, automatically activates local payment options (Bancontact, BLIK, iDEAL, TWINT, Swish, MobilePay, Przelewy24, Multibanco, and more) without manual per-market setup.
• Managed Markets (powered by Global-e) acts as merchant of record, handling duties, taxes, compliance, and local payment methods for cross-border orders.
• Markets moved to a top-level admin surface in 2026, and the new submarket model lets a parent market template its settings down to child markets.
• Shopify Scripts are deprecated as of June 30, 2026. If your checkout customizations still run on Scripts, they will break.

What Shopify Managed Markets actually does (and what it does not)

Managed Markets, powered by Global-e, makes Global-e the merchant of record, meaning it becomes the legal entity responsible for the sale. This shifts the burden of adhering to local laws and regulations from you to Global-e. That is a bigger deal than it sounds. Managed Markets takes care of local regulations, taxes, duties, international shipping, and localization for each international market.

Two guarantees in particular remove the most common cross-border friction:

• Managed Markets ensures that you can refund orders at the currency conversion rate that was given at the time of purchase within 30 days to avoid currency rate fluctuations.
• The duty and tax amounts displayed at checkout are guaranteed. Even when the amount charged by customs is different, Managed Markets covers the difference and you do not pay any additional fees.

On cost: to use Managed Markets, your store needs to be on the Basic plan or higher. A 1.5% currency conversion fee (also known as the FX fee) applies.

For payments specifically, when you use both Managed Payment Methods and Managed Markets together, domestic transactions (orders from customers in the same country as your store) are processed through Shopify Payments, with local payment methods applying to those transactions. Cross-border transactions continue to be processed through Managed Markets with Shopify Payments, powered by Global-e, and your Managed Markets setup, fees, and transaction handling are unaffected.

The Spring '26 checkout redesign: what changed

Checkout got a redesign aimed at conversion: delivery options that are easier to scan, a pay button that stands out, and less scrolling on mobile. These are not cosmetic tweaks. On most stores, mobile accounts for the majority of checkout sessions, and reducing scroll depth on that final screen has a direct read-through to conversion rate.

Two other Spring '26 checkout features are worth calling out:

Mixed ship-and-pickup in a single cart. Ship-and-pickup in a single checkout is a long-awaited fix: a customer can choose shipping for one item and in-store pickup for another without splitting the order in two. Merchants on Plus and Enterprise plans can now offer customers the flexibility to select shipping and store pickup for different items within a single order.

Managed payment method ordering. Shopify Payments dynamically orders payment methods in each checkout, displaying the options most likely to convert. This is powered by network-level signal intelligence (SNI): Shopify looks at the buyer's location, device, and shopping behavior to rank payment options. This is a small mechanical change with a potentially meaningful payoff.

Also shipping in Spring '26: address format validation in Checkout Blocks is now available to all merchants, preventing non-compliant shipping addresses during checkout to ensure accurate deliveries.

Managed Payment Methods: the auto-activation feature you need to audit today

Before May 27, 2026, every local payment method had to be manually toggled on per market. Until recently, every local payment method had to be manually enabled per market: Bancontact for Belgium, BLIK for Poland, iDEAL/Wero for the Netherlands, TWINT for Switzerland, Swish for Sweden, MobilePay for Denmark and Finland, Sofort across Europe, EPS for Austria, Przelewy24 for Poland, Multibanco for Portugal, and ACH Direct Debit for US B2B. After May 27, Shopify activates these automatically as new buyer regions appear in your store data, and adds new ones over time without any merchant action.

For the vast majority of stores, this is a net positive: you stop leaving local payment methods off the table because nobody remembered to enable them. The default behavior is good for conversion in almost every market.

However, there is one important dependency: if SNI (signal network intelligence) is not already active in your Customer Privacy settings, you will be prompted to activate it as part of enabling Managed Payment Methods. For privacy-conscious markets such as the EU, especially Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, SNI is a legitimate data-sharing question that should go through your privacy team, not be auto-flipped during a routine admin sync.

On May 12, 2026, Shopify also shipped parity between Shop Pay and guest checkout for local methods. Shop Pay checkout now supports more of the payment methods offered through Shopify Payments, including local and regional options such as Bancontact, BLIK, EPS, MobilePay, Multibanco, Przelewy24, Swish, TWINT, and USDC, only where those methods are already enabled and where rollout includes that market. Shopify has also revamped the payment methods section of Shop Pay to better remember buyer preferences and maximize conversion.

The rebuilt Markets admin: submarkets and what they unlock

Markets shifted from a settings tab to a top-level surface in Shopify admin during 2026, and now aggregates international, retail, and business-to-business sales in one place.

The structural addition that matters most is submarkets. Submarkets are the ability to create a smaller market inside a parent market and inherit its customizations rather than rebuild from scratch. In practice this works as follows: you create a market for North America, set USD as the currency, select a product catalog, and customize your theme. You then create a submarket for Canada. The Canada submarket automatically inherits the parent market's customizations. You can update specific settings like changing the currency from USD to CAD while keeping the theme and catalog.

Per-market theme settings are now also more granular. Themes now allow settings and app embeds to be customized per market, rather than applying globally. This means your banner, featured collection, or app block for a European market no longer bleeds into your US storefront.

For multi-currency gift cards, merchants selling to multiple markets from a single shop can now sell and issue gift cards in any currency they operate in, not just the shop's primary currency.

Plan-level gates to keep in mind: creating region markets, customizing currencies, domains and languages per market, applying discounts to specific markets, and managing duties and import taxes are all available from Starter or Basic upward. Per-market theme customization and per-market checkout and accounts pages require Advanced or Plus.

The deadline you cannot miss: Shopify Scripts end June 30, 2026

Shopify Scripts, the old Ruby-based way of customizing checkout, stops running on June 30, 2026. Anything still on Scripts has to move to Shopify Functions before that date, or those checkout customizations break. As of April 15, 2026, you can no longer edit or publish Scripts, but they can still run until the deadline.

This is especially critical for merchants using custom cross-border logic, such as market-specific discount rules, duty display overrides, or conditional shipping rates built in Scripts. If those break silently on July 1, you will not find out until orders start behaving strangely. Audit your Scripts stack this week.

If you need help migrating checkout customizations to Shopify Functions or need a developer to rebuild your cross-border checkout logic, our Shopify Plus development service covers exactly this.

Shop Pay opens up to 250 million shoppers for any platform

Businesses of all sizes can now offer Shop Pay at checkout even if they are not using Shopify's online store, gaining access to 250M+ shoppers and one-click purchasing. For merchants selling cross-border through third-party storefronts or marketplaces, this is a material conversion lever: Shop Pay customers have pre-saved addresses and payment details, removing the biggest friction point in international checkout.

Businesses around the globe can offer customers local and regional payment methods in one wallet with Shop Pay. Combined with Managed Markets' guaranteed duties and taxes at checkout, the combination reduces the two most common reasons international shoppers abandon: uncertainty about the final price, and a checkout that does not offer their preferred local payment method.

Real-world benchmark: what happens when merchants actually use this

Caden Lane is one brand using Managed Markets for cross-border ecommerce. The company's CFO says it allowed the brand to start selling in over 180 international markets overnight. Orders can reach Canada in a day and the UK in two or three days at lower shipping costs than before. The result: a 692% lift in international sales.

Those numbers are an outlier, but the mechanism behind them is not. Guaranteed landed costs at checkout eliminate the doorstep-duty surprise that causes customers to refuse packages and demand refunds. Combined with local payment methods, the checkout stops feeling foreign.

Action checklist

Here is what to do right now, in priority order:

1. Before June 30, 2026: Audit every active Shopify Script. Migrate checkout customizations to Shopify Functions or a public app before the deprecation deadline.
2. Managed Payment Methods audit: Review your Customer Privacy settings for SNI activation. Check whether any existing payment customization Functions assume a fixed sort order, because Managed Payment Methods now controls that dynamically.
3. Submarkets setup: If you manage more than three international markets, model them as parent/submarket pairs to reduce duplicated configuration. Use the new Graph view in the Markets admin to verify which settings each market inherits.
4. Local payment methods check: Go to Settings > Payments and confirm which methods are enabled in each of your key markets. Managed Payment Methods will auto-activate eligible methods, but you can also add methods manually before that happens.
5. Duties and tariffs: Duties and import taxes now support customizing the percentage of the value of your products that Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs apply to. If you ship physical goods into the US, review your HS code configurations.
6. Mixed-fulfillment testing: If you run retail locations alongside your online store, test orders that combine shipping and in-store pickup. Apps and Functions that touch delivery or fulfillment logic may need updates for mixed-fulfillment orders.

For a deeper look at how to structure a Shopify Markets expert engagement around submarkets and Managed Markets, the linked service page covers exactly that scope.

The Spring '26 release did not invent cross-border selling on Shopify. What it did was remove the last set of excuses for not doing it: manual payment method toggles are gone, checkout is redesigned for mobile conversion, and the submarket model means you no longer rebuild market configurations from scratch for every new country. The infrastructure is in place. The question is whether your store configuration has caught up.