In short. Append a country parameter such as ?country=DE to target a country experience when that country has no separate Shopify URL.
Definition: As of 17 October 2026, a Shopify country deep link is a store URL with a country parameter, such as
?country=DE, that selects a country's shopping experience when the country has no separate URL.
Key facts
- Shopify's international domains documentation describes deep links for country-targeted marketing campaigns and shared links.
- Shopify's CountryCode reference generally follows ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes;
DEdesignates Germany. - Shopify's market overview says cross-border markets can group countries together or cover a single country.
What does the link look like?
Shopify's documented Germany example uses this address on a shared market domain:
example.com?country=DE
Here, example.com is the example store domain, country is the parameter name, and DE selects Germany. The same documentation places this example in a market containing several countries.
A query is the part of a URL introduced by its first question mark. RFC 3986, section 3.4, defines that boundary and says the query ends at a # character or the end of the address. In the Shopify example, country=DE occupies the query component. The spelling of the parameter and its country-selection behaviour come from Shopify's documentation.
Which market experience does the country select?
A market is a set of customers defined in a Shopify store. Shopify's overview of markets features and concepts explains that countries and regions can define which customers belong to a cross-border market. Customizations determine the store experience for those customers.
Market configuration includes currency and domain or language settings. A catalog is a set of products with optional custom pricing assigned to a market. Catalogs determine product availability and prices within that market. A submarket is a market within another market and inherits its parent's customizations. These settings describe the experience against which a country-targeted link can be checked.
How are language and translation configured?
Shopify's localization and translation documentation describes language publishing separately. Each published language receives its own URLs. Translated content appears where translations exist, and missing translations fall back to the store's default language.
The language settings allow a merchant to add, publish, and remove languages, change the default language, and choose which languages each market uses.
Related terms
- URL parameters
- How do I choose subfolders for Shopify markets?
- How does Shopify add hreflang for international domains?
FAQ
Can I target a country inside a shared market?
Yes. Shopify's deep-link documentation covers markets containing several countries and countries without their own URL.
What if a translation is missing?
Shopify's localization documentation says your store displays content in its default language when translations are missing.
Sources
- Shopify Help Center, "International domains", undated
- Shopify.dev, "CountryCode", undated
- Shopify Help Center, "Overview of markets features and concepts", undated
- RFC Editor, "Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax", January 2005
- Shopify Help Center, "Localization and translation", undated
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