American merchants keep asking us the same thing: how do you actually get Europe right? Not just multi-currency pricing, but the operational details that make or break a launch. It's come up often enough that we've decided to build a dedicated US presence to answer it directly, rather than handling it long-distance from Prague.
Why the US, and why now
Almost everything we've built so far has been for merchants already operating in Europe: Czech and Slovak brands, CEE partners, and enterprise clients like Philips who needed their European markets connected and running well on Shopify. What we've noticed more and more, though, is a different kind of request coming from the other direction: American merchants who've built a solid business at home and see Europe as the obvious next step, but underestimate how much work "obvious" actually is.
Shopify Markets vs. expansion stores, VAT registration, per-country payment preferences, multi-currency pricing, localized content that doesn't read like a translation, GDPR, logistics across a dozen different regulatory regimes: none of it is exotic if you've done it before, but it adds months to a project if you haven't. That's the gap we think we can close. We've spent years inside European Shopify Plus setups, running multiple markets under one account, and that experience doesn't automatically show up on a US merchant's radar unless someone is there to make the case for it in person.
Having a dedicated US presence means American merchants get a local point of contact instead of a time zone gap, without losing the European depth we've built our name on. That's what we're building out this year.
We've done this before, just from the other side
Two projects show what we mean by European depth. Philips came to us needing separate, localized Shopify stores for Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, each connected to a global product feed and to Philips' own ERP and pricing systems. Dedoles, the Slovak apparel brand, needed the opposite fix: a legacy custom platform that couldn't keep up across 15 markets. We migrated them to Shopify, and returning-customer growth is up 20% since.
Both projects required the kind of market-by-market judgment that's hard to fake: knowing which payment methods matter in which country, how ERP integrations actually need to be structured for European tax and fulfillment rules, and where a single template genuinely can't be copy-pasted across borders.
That's also the profile of one of our newest clients: Codex Labs, the Silicon Valley skincare and biotech brand that already sells through dermatology clinics and aestheticians across Slovakia, Ireland, the UK, Germany, France, and Austria. Codex Labs is exactly the kind of merchant our US expansion is built for: an American company with genuine traction in Europe already, ready to scale that presence rather than start from zero.
Meet us at DotDev in Toronto
Building a US presence only means something if we show up in person. The Digismoothie team will be at DotDev, Shopify's developer event in Toronto, July 21 to 22. If you're attending and want to talk about expanding into Europe, running a multi-market Shopify Plus setup, or anything in between, come find us.
If you're building a US brand and Europe is on the roadmap, or you're already there and it feels harder than it should, get in touch.
