Multi region recipe
Saleor provides a flexible and powerful approach to multi-region commerce through its channels feature, allowing businesses to operate across various regions, currencies, and markets from a single backend instance. This report explores how to effectively set up and manage a multi-region shop using Saleor's channel architecture.
Setup Channels
Saleor's approach to multi-region commerce is built around the concept of Channels. A channel in Saleor represents a specific sales context, which can be a geographical region, business model, brand, or sales channel. This architecture provides significant advantages over maintaining multiple separate instances of your e-commerce platform.
Create channels for a single country or whole region. You'll need to consider the currency limitation: each channel can only support one currency. If you operate in regions with different currencies, you'll need to create separate channels for each currency.
Warehouses and Shipping Zones
Create at least one warehouse. You can choose different allocation strategies depending on your business logic. If your business has physical stores, you may want to add their locations as warehouses with pick up option.
Shipping zones define where products can be shipped and what shipping methods are available. Create new one by giving it its name and choosing which counties it operates on. After it's creation you can add shipping methods which can further restrict its availability to certain postal code ranges.
Assign warehouse and shipping zone to their channels.
Create products and assign their channel listing
Update channel availability and stocks of your products.
Translations
Use translations to provide localized names and descriptions. You can translate product details, attributes, shiping options and others.
To ensure email communication follows chosen language of the customer, use Checkout.languageCode field to store that information. It will be also available in Order entity, giving your email integration info which language should be used.
Payments and taxes
Each region has it's popular payment gateways. Use one of the gateways available in the App Store, or implement your own.
Taxes often varies significantly between regions. If flat rates are not enough, you may want to use one of the existing apps or create your own. Each channel can be configured separately.
Implementing Multi-Region in your Storefront
After configuring your channels in the Saleor backend, you'll need to implement the multi-region approach in your storefront.
Channel Selection in Storefront: Use different subdomains, automatically redirect customers based on their IP or implement channel selection.
Multiple Storefront deployments: Some businesses might want to build separate storefronts aligned with particular region. In this scenario channel will be hardcoded and multiple deployments will still use the same API.