Shopify is aggressively expanding its native payments infrastructure into 17 new markets across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, with full rollout targeted for September 2026. The expansion — which includes Vietnam, Colombia, Romania, and the Philippines among its marquee additions — is the company’s largest single geographic push for Shopify Payments since the product launched in 2013, and it’s already forcing DTC founders and agency operators to rethink their international payment stack strategies.
For merchants currently routing cross-border transactions through third-party gateways like Adyen, Stripe, or Braintree, the implications are significant. Shopify Payments consolidates checkout, fraud tooling, currency conversion, and payout rails inside a single dashboard — and in markets where it’s now live, merchants report checkout conversion lifts averaging 8–14% compared to legacy gateway setups, according to internal Shopify merchant data shared at the company’s Commerce+ partner summit in Toronto last month.
Which Markets Are Going Live and When?
According to documentation reviewed by Ecommerce Times, the 17-market expansion follows a phased schedule. The first wave — covering Colombia, Vietnam, and Romania — goes live July 14. A second wave including the Philippines, Kenya, Morocco, Croatia, and Serbia follows August 19. The final tranche, which includes Ecuador, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, and four additional Eastern European markets, closes out the rollout by September 30.
Each market integration includes local acquiring, meaning Shopify is processing payments through in-country banking infrastructure rather than routing everything through a U.S. or EU parent entity. That distinction matters operationally: local acquiring typically reduces interchange fees by 30–60 basis points and meaningfully improves bank authorization rates, which in emerging markets can run 10–20 points below U.S. benchmarks on cross-border transactions.
How Does This Change the Economics for DTC Brands Going Global?
For DTC operators who have historically cobbled together international payment stacks — a primary gateway, a local alternative payment method (APM) layer, a currency conversion tool, and a separate fraud solution — the consolidation pitch is straightforward. Fewer vendors means fewer reconciliation headaches, and Shopify’s blended transaction fee in new markets is expected to land between 1.8% and 2.4% depending on card type and plan tier, competitive with what most mid-market merchants are negotiating with standalone processors.
“We’ve had clients running three or four vendors just to handle payments in Southeast Asia — Stripe for cards, a local APM partner, a separate FX tool, and then something for chargebacks. Shopify collapsing that into one layer is going to make international expansion accessible to brands doing $2M a year, not just $20M.” — Kristen Mallory, Managing Director, Northgate Commerce Group
That sentiment is broadly shared among agency leaders, though not without caveats. Shopify Payments still lacks support for several high-volume APMs in the new markets — GrabPay in Vietnam and the Philippines, for instance, is not included in the initial rollout, nor is PSE (Pagos Seguros en Línea) in Colombia. For brands where those methods represent 20–40% of local transaction volume, a hybrid stack will remain necessary at launch.
- Vietnam: Shopify Payments supports Visa, Mastercard, and JCB at launch; GrabPay and MoMo wallet support expected Q1 2027
- Colombia: Cards and Nequi support confirmed; PSE integration listed as “in development”
- Philippines: Cards and Maya (formerly PayMaya) supported; GCash timeline unconfirmed
- Romania/Croatia/Serbia: Full EU card rails plus local bank transfer options
- Kenya: M-Pesa integration confirmed at launch — a notable first for Shopify Payments in Africa
The Kenya inclusion is being watched closely across the industry. M-Pesa integration at the Shopify Payments level — not through a third-party app — signals that Shopify is taking sub-Saharan Africa seriously as a commerce frontier, not just an afterthought. Kenya’s ecommerce market grew 31% year-over-year in 2025 according to the GSMA’s Mobile Commerce Index, and M-Pesa handles over 60% of digital consumer transactions in the country.
What Does This Mean for Third-Party Payment App Partners?
The expansion creates obvious tension with Shopify’s own app ecosystem. Dozens of payment and checkout apps built their businesses on geographic gaps in Shopify Payments coverage — processing transactions in markets where native Payments wasn’t available, collecting the 0.5–2% third-party gateway fee Shopify charges on non-native payment processors, and often providing localization features merchants couldn’t get natively.
“Every time Shopify Payments enters a new market, we lose a chunk of revenue there. That’s just the math. But the honest answer is that merchants in those markets win, and if you’re building on top of Shopify you have to accept that the platform is going to keep eating inward.” — Dev Anand Patel, CEO, CheckoutGlobal (a Shopify payments app partner)
Shopify has historically offset this by growing the overall pie — more merchants entering new markets through Payments means more total GMV on platform, which benefits the ecosystem broadly. But for app developers whose primary value proposition was geographic arbitrage, the window is narrowing. Shopify’s own data suggests that Payments now processes over 68% of all Shopify GMV globally, up from 54% in early 2024.
How Are Cross-Border Sellers Responding Right Now?
Among sellers Ecommerce Times spoke with, the reaction splits largely along GMV lines. Brands doing under $5M annually are enthusiastic — the simplification argument resonates strongly with lean teams. Brands above $20M in international GMV are more cautious, citing concerns about payout timing, currency hold periods during the initial market rollout, and the absence of dedicated enterprise support SLAs in new geographies.
One Shopify Plus merchant — a personal care brand doing roughly $18M in annual revenue with significant Southeast Asia exposure — described a structured evaluation process before committing to migrate away from their existing Adyen setup in Vietnam and the Philippines.
“We’re not switching day one. We’re going to run a 60-day parallel test in Vietnam, compare authorization rates, chargeback ratios, and net payout timing. If Shopify Payments wins on the numbers, we migrate. But we’ve built too much on our current stack to move on faith.” — Sophie Tran, Head of International Growth, Verdant Skincare (Shopify Plus merchant)
That measured approach is increasingly the template among sophisticated operators. Several Shopify Plus agencies told Ecommerce Times they’re already building evaluation frameworks for clients — typically a 45–90 day live testing window comparing transaction-level metrics before any full migration recommendation.
What Are the Regulatory Hurdles in These New Markets?
Cross-border payment expansion is never purely a product story. In several of the 17 markets, Shopify will be operating under new regulatory frameworks that impose merchant-of-record obligations, local data residency requirements, or licensing conditions that affect how disputes and refunds are handled.
In Vietnam specifically, the State Bank of Vietnam’s Circular 09/2023 requires that payment intermediaries processing domestic transactions hold a local payment intermediary license. Shopify confirmed to Ecommerce Times that it has secured the requisite licensing through a local entity structure, but declined to identify its banking partners. Romania and Croatia, as EU member states, fall under PSD2 and the new EU Payment Services Regulation (PSR) that took effect in January 2026, which imposes stronger SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) requirements — Shopify Payments’ existing 3DS2 infrastructure handles this natively.
Kenya’s regulatory environment is managed through the Central Bank of Kenya’s National Payment System framework, and M-Pesa’s inclusion required direct integration with Safaricom’s API infrastructure — a partnership Shopify has not formally disclosed but which multiple industry sources confirmed to Ecommerce Times.
- Vietnam: Local payment intermediary license secured; data residency compliance confirmed
- Romania/Croatia: PSD2/PSR compliant via existing 3DS2 infrastructure
- Kenya: CBK-regulated; M-Pesa enabled via Safaricom API integration
- Colombia: Superintendencia Financiera oversight; local acquiring via undisclosed banking partner
- Philippines: BSP (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas) licensing status: confirmed active
What Should Shopify Merchants Do Before the Rollout Hits?
Agency leaders are advising merchant clients in affected markets to take several concrete steps before July 14, when the first wave goes live. The primary concern is ensuring existing payment configurations don’t create duplicate processing scenarios — merchants who have third-party gateways configured for a market where Shopify Payments activates could face routing conflicts that affect checkout UX.
Practical recommendations circulating among Plus partners include auditing current payment provider configurations by market, confirming currency settings in Shopify Markets, and reviewing payout account designations for each new geography. Merchants with existing Adyen or Stripe agreements should also review contract minimum volume commitments — switching volume to Shopify Payments mid-contract in affected markets could trigger shortfall clauses in some enterprise gateway agreements.
For brands not yet active in these 17 markets, the expansion materially lowers the operational barrier to entry. Launching in Vietnam or Colombia through Shopify Payments in September 2026 will require substantially less vendor onboarding, compliance groundwork, and engineering lift than it did 12 months ago — a dynamic that is expected to accelerate the number of English-language DTC brands making their first moves into these markets before the 2026 holiday season.
Shopify declined to provide a spokesperson comment ahead of a formal announcement expected later this month. The company’s next Commerce+ briefing for Plus partners is scheduled for June 24 in New York.
