ℹ️ Pricing zones vs shipping zones: Pricing zones define how products are priced in a market — including tax strategy and any price adjustments. Shipping zones define the regions you ship to and control which carriers, rates, and rules apply. They work together but serve different purposes. See Understanding shipping zones for more.
⚠️ Pricing zones require the Advanced or Plus Shopify plan.
ℹ️ For step-by-step instructions on creating a pricing zone, see How to create a pricing zone.
How pricing zones work
On the Pricing Zones page, you can define a single set of pricing rules and apply them to a group of countries. These countries are then managed as a unit, saving time compared to configuring pricing for each country individually.
Each country can only belong to one Pricing Zone at a time. When changes are saved, Swap automatically updates the corresponding Shopify Markets.
Pricing models
Swap supports two pricing models within a Pricing Zone: Dynamic Pricing and Fixed Pricing. You can select the model when configuring a Pricing Zone.
Dynamic pricing
Dynamic Pricing adjusts product prices using a coefficient and tax strategy. Prices are calculated dynamically per country and synced to Shopify as price adjustments.
Coefficient
Use a pricing coefficient to increase or decrease the base price of products in the selected zone. This is applied before tax and duty calculations.
For example, a +10% coefficient will raise a $100 product to $110. This adjusted price is then used for tax calculation.
Dynamic Pricing is the default model when creating a new Pricing Zone.
Fixed pricing
Fixed Pricing lets you set exact prices per product variant, either by uploading a CSV file or importing them directly from an existing Shopify catalog. These prices override any dynamic pricing configuration.
You can download the current fixed pricing list for any zone as a CSV. This shows all product variants with fixed prices and when they were last updated.
Only the variants included in your uploaded CSV or imported catalog use fixed pricing. Others fall back to dynamic pricing.
Each Pricing Zone requires its own CSV or catalog import. Fixed prices are not shared across zones.
Each upload fully replaces the previous fixed pricing list. Partial updates are not supported.
Importing from Shopify: instead of uploading a CSV, you can import fixed prices directly from an existing Shopify catalog by selecting one from a searchable list. This pulls prices straight from the catalog's price list, without needing to export, reformat, or re-upload a file. CSV upload and Shopify import are mutually exclusive — use one or the other for a zone, not both.
Currency selector: once you've selected a Shopify catalog or uploaded a valid CSV, a Currency field appears below. If importing from Shopify, this shows the catalog's own currency for reference — it isn't editable, since the catalog's price list defines it. If uploading a CSV, choose Local Currency (default) to apply values as-is per country — for example, uploading a fixed price of '20' to a pricing zone containing United Kingdom and Netherlands applies 20 GBP for United Kingdom and 20 EUR for Netherlands — or select a specific currency (for example EUR, GBP, or AED) to treat all uploaded values as that one currency, with Shopify converting the price for each storefront.
Compare At Price: the fixed pricing CSV template includes a
Compare At Pricecolumn alongside the regularPricecolumn — fill it in to sync strike-through ("was") prices to Shopify price lists for international storefronts. Tax adjustments (for example, VAT-inclusive pricing) apply automatically to both columns. LeaveCompare At Priceempty or set it to 0 to skip it for a variant. CSV templates downloaded before this update don't include the column — download a new template to use it.
If no new CSV or catalog import is applied when updating a zone, the store will retain and apply the existing fixed prices for that zone.
Tax strategy
The selected tax strategy applies to both Dynamic and Fixed Pricing. It determines how taxes and duties are handled within the zone.
The options are:
Checkout only – taxes and/or duties aren't included in the product price, and are shown in a breakdown at checkout.
Tax inclusive – taxes such as VAT (Europe) or sales tax (U.S.) are included in the product price and not shown as a breakdown at checkout.
Duties inclusive – duties are included in the product price and not shown in a breakdown at checkout.
TLC inclusive – taxes and duties are both included in the product price.
Advanced settings
Under Advanced settings, you can indicate whether your prices already include taxes and duties. The checkbox is labelled "Back calculate and adjust the cost of product prices," under "Taxes already included in the product prices (optional)."
How it behaves depends on whether you are using Fixed Pricing or Dynamic Pricing:
Fixed Pricing
You upload or set product prices manually (e.g. via CSV).
The checkbox tells Swap whether those fixed prices already include VAT/duties.
Checked → Swap treats your provided prices as inclusive, and will not add VAT/duties on top.
Unchecked → Swap treats your provided prices as exclusive, and will add VAT/duties at checkout according to the selected tax strategy.
Dynamic Pricing
Swap calculates prices for you based on base price + rules.
The checkbox controls whether taxes/duties are added or back-calculated:
Unchecked → Swap adds taxes/duties on top of the calculated base price (e.g. £100 + taxes/duties).
Checked → Swap back-calculates taxes/duties from the calculated base price, treating it as already inclusive (e.g. £100 including taxes/duties).
About nexus
Taxes and duties are only collected in countries where your brand has reached a tax nexus (a local threshold for sales or order volume).
If your brand has not hit nexus, taxes and duties will not be applied, even if TLC inclusive is selected.
Once you have hit nexus and enabled tax collection in that country, Swap will apply VAT and duties according to your Pricing Zone settings (added or back-calculated depending on the checkbox).
Safeguards and warnings
To prevent misconfiguration and improve clarity, several UI features are built into the Pricing Zones interface:
Confirmation modal: Any update to a pricing zone will prompt a confirmation message, clarifying that changes will be pushed to Shopify immediately.
Auto-disable for unsupported strategies: If none of the selected countries support a specific tax strategy (e.g. TLC inclusive), that option will automatically be disabled.
Warning banner: If you select a tax strategy that only some countries support (e.g. Tax inclusive with the United States included), a banner will appear to flag the incompatibility.
Shopify plan requirements
Pricing Zones use Shopify Markets in the background. This functionality is only available on Advanced and Plus Shopify plans. Limits include:
A maximum of 50 Shopify Markets per store
Ineligibility on Basic, Trial, or standard Shopify plans
Limitations
Updating a pricing zone will recreate the associated Shopify Market, which may remove existing Shopify configurations such as domain or language settings.
Fixed pricing cannot be mixed with dynamic pricing strategies within the same zone.
No markup or markdown (coefficient) is available for fixed pricing.
Bulk uploads across multiple pricing zones are not supported.
Fixed prices must be uploaded or imported per zone.
If a Pricing Zone is currently managed by an active Pricing Strategy, it will be locked for editing, and a banner will indicate that status.
Managing your pricing zones
Each row on the Pricing Zones page displays:
The zone name
Assigned countries
Applied pricing coefficient
Selected tax strategy
A sample product price preview
You can filter by zone name or country for easier navigation.
To create or edit Pricing Zones, see How to create a pricing zone.