Shopify Managed Markets duties: what the 24 August DDP switch means for your prices

The short answer

• What changed: from 24 August 2026, Shopify Managed Markets stopped supporting DDU in every country and region where it supports DDP, and those markets moved to DDP automatically (Shopify's changelog).
• What the customer sees: duties and taxes are paid at checkout, not on delivery. With duty-inclusive pricing, which Shopify turns on by default when you activate Managed Markets, the duty is built into the product price and never shown as a separate line.
• The part people miss: with that setting on, the included duty is an average per destination country. A new store, or one with few international orders, starts from an average for stores in its category.
• The data that matters: Managed Markets assigns its own HS codes and may not use the one you entered. Shopify says accurate countries of origin are your responsibility.
• The way out: keeping pay on delivery in a DDP market now means turning Managed Markets off for that market, and some of what that changes cannot be reversed.

On 11 August 2026 Shopify posted a changelog entry, 13 days before the change it described: "On August 24, 2026, Shopify Managed Markets will stop supporting delivered duty unpaid (DDU) in every country and region where it supports delivered duty paid (DDP)." The same post said that if you were happy with the change, "no action is needed."

That sentence is accurate, and it is also easy to read as nothing to worry about. Shopify Managed Markets duties are now paid at checkout wherever DDP is supported. Depending on one setting, that duty either sits inside your product price as an estimate or is handled however you set it at checkout, and either way it is paid before delivery. If your catalogue was built for Amazon first and Shopify second, the customs data behind that estimate may never have had anyone look at it.

Black Friday will be the first peak season since the switch. This guide covers what changed, how Shopify now builds the international price, and the checks we would make on a store before that traffic arrives.

Where the duty gets paid moved from the doorstep to the checkout

Before 24 August 2026, in DDU markets

Delivered duty unpaid

• The customer pays duties and taxes to the carrier or customs on delivery.
• The checkout total leaves the duty out.

The surprise arrives with the parcel

From 24 August 2026, wherever DDP is supported

Delivered duty paid

• The customer pays duties and taxes at checkout.
• Where duty-inclusive pricing is on, the duty sits inside the product price.

The duty is settled before the customer buys

Shopify Managed Markets only. DDU remains only in countries and regions where Managed Markets does not support DDP. Keeping pay on delivery in a DDP market means turning Managed Markets off for that market.

What changed in Shopify Managed Markets duties on 24 August 2026?

Managed Markets is Shopify's cross-border service in which Global-e becomes the merchant of record, the business legally selling to your overseas customer (Shopify's Managed Markets overview). Until 24 August 2026 some markets ran on DDU, delivered duty unpaid, where the customer settles duties and taxes when the parcel arrives.

Shopify's changelog sets out the switch in three lines. Markets that use or inherit DDU "automatically move to DDP wherever Managed Markets supports it." Customers in those markets "will now pay duties and taxes at checkout, not to the carrier or customs on delivery." And merchants who wanted to keep pay on delivery had to turn off Managed Markets before 24 August 2026.

Shopify's current help page confirms that is still how it works as of 13 October 2026: "Delivered duty unpaid (DDU) shipping remains available only in countries and regions where DDP isn't supported" (Considerations for using Managed Markets).

Who it affects: any brand selling cross-border through Shopify Managed Markets into a market that was on DDU. That can include Amazon brands who opened a Shopify store for direct customers and switched on Managed Markets so that someone else would handle customs.

Shopify's reasoning is fair: its changelog says collecting at checkout "helps avoid surprise costs on delivery." The trade is that the cost now arrives earlier, in the number the customer sees before they decide to buy.

Why the price your overseas customer sees may have moved

This part is not in the changelog at all. It is in Shopify's page on international pricing for Managed Markets.

Duty-inclusive pricing is the default: "Including duties and taxes in prices is turned on by default when you activate Managed Markets." With it on, your product pages show a price that includes import tax, duties and Managed Markets transactional fees, with a message that duties and taxes are included. Shopify also says that "At checkout, duties are never displayed as a separate line item."

The duty inside that price is an average: "The included duties and taxes are calculated as an average for each destination country, not as a single average across all countries." For a new store, or a store with few international orders, Shopify says the estimate starts from an average for stores in your category, then moves toward your own realized duties for each country as orders come in.

And Shopify names the trap itself: "If most of your catalog qualifies for duty-free treatment under a trade agreement, then your prices might be higher initially until the average adjusts." So a brand whose goods should cross a border duty-free can still show a duty-loaded price for a while, simply because it has not sold enough into that country yet.

With the setting on, none of this costs you margin directly. Shopify says your payout stays consistent with your domestic orders, and that when the duty built into an order differs from what customs assesses, the difference is covered so that neither you nor your customer pays more after the order is placed. The cost, if there is one, shows up somewhere less obvious: in how many overseas visitors look at that price and leave.

We have no data showing that conversion fell after 24 August 2026 for any store. What changed is when and where the customer meets the duty, in the product price or in the checkout total, so it is worth measuring rather than assuming.

How to know if the switch touched your store

Three questions answer it.

• Is Managed Markets on, and for which markets? In the Shopify admin, each market under Markets has a Shopify Managed Markets section showing whether it is on. Only those markets are in scope.
• Was any of them on DDU before 24 August 2026? If a market was already on DDP, nothing changed for it on that date.
• Is duty-inclusive pricing on for that market? Shopify keeps the setting per market, under Taxes and duties. If it is on, the duty is inside your product price. If you turned it off, you chose how duty and tax are displayed at checkout.

Shopify's View as feature on any product page lets you pick a country and see the adjusted price a customer there would see. Doing that for your best sellers, market by market, quickly shows where a price looks high next to your domestic one.

Then the measurement. The way we would measure it is to compare international checkout conversion by country for the weeks before 24 August 2026 and the weeks after, market by market, rather than as one international number. A blended figure can hide one market falling and another rising, and a market with very few orders will give a noisy answer.

For brands that also sell on Amazon in the same countries, the comparison is a useful sanity check. We cover the Amazon side of that expansion in our guide to expanding from the US to the UK, EU and Canada on Amazon.

Five checks before peak, in the order we would work through them

1. 1Duties in prices, per market

   Is duty-inclusive pricing on or off for each Managed Markets market? Shopify turns it on by default.

2. 2Your HS codes against Managed Markets codes

   Managed Markets assigns its own HS codes and may not use the one you entered. Shopify lets you compare them on each product.

3. 3Country of origin on every product

   Shopify says accurate countries of origin are your responsibility. A product without one takes the store default.

4. 4EU orders up to 150 euro

   From 1 July 2026, a flat 3 euro customs duty per tariff line, which Shopify applies automatically.

5. 5Conversion by country

   Before and after 24 August 2026, one market at a time, not one blended number.

Shopify Managed Markets stores. The order of the checks is AVA INC. guidance, not Shopify's.

What to check first: HS codes and country of origin

An HS code is the international trade code, usually six digits, that tells customs what a product is. The country of origin is where the product was made or assembled into the form you sell it in (Shopify's page on adding HS codes). Between them they drive the duty estimate.

Here is the line that changes the picture. When you activate Managed Markets, Shopify says "HS codes are automatically assigned to your products." Your own codes are taken into account, but "it isn't guaranteed that the exact HS code that you entered for your product is the same that will be used by Managed Markets." So the code driving the duty may not be the one in your product record.

Shopify gives you a way to see both. On a product's page, in the Shipping section, next to the Harmonized System (HS) code, there is a view of the Managed Markets codes. Comparing the two on your best sellers tells you whether the classification behind your price is the one you would have chosen.

Country of origin has its own trap. If you never set a default, Managed Markets assigns one based on where most of your products are made, and any product without its own origin takes that default. A brand with most products made in one country and a few in another can end up with the minority carrying the wrong origin. Shopify's position is plain: "It's your responsibility to ensure that your products have accurate countries of origin."

Why this matters more for Amazon-first brands is our reasoning, not Shopify's: if your product data was built for Amazon listings and copied across, the customs fields in Shopify may have been filled in once, in bulk, by whoever set the store up. That is worth checking before you assume they are right. Shopify's duties and import taxes CSV export can list the products with missing information, which is a quicker start than opening products one by one.

One third-party agency, Common Thread Collective's guide to the DDU change, makes the general point that incomplete HS codes stop duties being calculated correctly, and that overcharging risks abandoned carts. It is a principle, not a measured figure: a reason to check, not evidence of a loss.

The EU 3 euro duty that arrived on 1 July 2026

Separately from DDU, Shopify's changelog of 26 June 2026 says Managed Markets supports the EU's flat 3 euro customs duty per tariff line on qualifying orders up to 150 euro shipped into the EU from outside the EU, from 1 July 2026 (Shopify's EU customs duty changelog). Shopify handles it automatically, with no settings change.

• Per tariff line, not per parcel: Shopify's own example is a parcel of only apparel at 3 euro, and a parcel of apparel, cosmetics, shoes and jewelry at 12 euro.
• On top of other charges: it is charged in addition to VAT and any national handling fees.
• Who it touches: shipments into the EU from outside the EU, including from the UK. Shipments within the EU are not affected.

For a brand that bundles different product types in one order, each extra tariff line adds to the duty. That is one more reason the HS code on each product is worth getting right, because it decides how many lines a mixed parcel has. Our guide to EU GPSR compliance covers the product safety side of selling into the EU.

How the fix gets made: absorb, show or leave

Once the data is right, the decision is per market. There are three routes, and none of them is right for every store.

Keep duty-inclusive pricing: the default. The customer sees one complete price and pays nothing on delivery. The risk is a higher-looking price while the per-country average settles, which is why the HS and origin checks come first.

Turn duty-inclusive pricing off for a market: Shopify lets you do this per market and choose how tax and duty are displayed at checkout. You then manage that market's pricing yourself. Shopify says duties are still guaranteed at checkout, so if customs assesses a different amount, Managed Markets covers the difference. One margin point to note: Shopify says that with the setting off, the Managed Markets fee is no longer added to your prices automatically, while the foreign exchange fee still is when currency conversion happens.

Leave Managed Markets for a market: the only route back to pay on delivery in a DDP-supported market. Shopify's deactivation page lists what changes. You become responsible for tax compliance and regulatory requirements there. Shipping rates exclusive to Managed Markets go. Managed Markets stops calculating duties, so you would set up Shopify's own duties and import taxes feature to keep collecting them at checkout. Existing orders can no longer be edited, and Shopify warns that "Some changes, such as losing the ability to edit existing orders, can't be reversed."

Our view, and it is only a view: leaving Managed Markets to fix a pricing worry is a large change to solve a problem that is often a data problem. We would fix the HS codes and origins, let a few weeks of orders feed the average, and only then decide whether a market needs to come out. How you set prices across markets is the same discipline as on Amazon, which our three-margin pricing framework sets out.

How to stop it catching you out again

Shopify's changelog entry went up 13 days before a change to the number your customers see before they buy. Amazon sellers know the pattern: the rules move, and the business that notices first is the one with someone watching.

• Treat customs fields as product data: HS code and country of origin get set when a product is created, not fixed later in bulk.
• Read the changelog often: Shopify's changelog carried this change from 11 August 2026, so a monthly glance could have missed most of the window.
• Keep one view per market: conversion by country, so a change in one market shows up on its own.
• Check after the busy season: peak orders feed each country's duty average, so prices may shift again in January.

Get your cross-border catalogue checked before peak

Most of what decides your Shopify Managed Markets duties is product data: the HS code, the country of origin and the market settings behind each price. That is the same kind of catalogue work we do on Amazon, and it is quicker to get right before the Black Friday traffic than to unpick after it.

Our marketplace expansion service covers the catalogue and settings work for selling across borders, and our Shopify service for Amazon sellers covers the store itself. We cannot tell you in advance what the switch did to your numbers, but we can look at them with you. Book a call and we will review your markets, your codes and your prices, and tell you what we would change first.

Common questions about Shopify Managed Markets duties

Sources

1. Managed Markets is ending DDU support, Shopify changelog (11 August 2026)changelog.shopify.com
2. Considerations for using Managed Markets, Shopify Help Centerhelp.shopify.com
3. International pricing for Managed Markets, Shopify Help Centerhelp.shopify.com
4. Managed Markets overview, Shopify Help Centerhelp.shopify.com
5. Adding HS codes to your products, Shopify Help Centerhelp.shopify.com
6. EU 3 euro import customs duty, Shopify changelog (26 June 2026)changelog.shopify.com
7. Shopify Managed Markets ends DDU on August 24, Common Thread Collective (third party)commonthreadco.com
8. Deactivate Managed Markets, Shopify Help Centerhelp.shopify.com

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