Three things stall an Australian go-live, and they're always the same three: tax settings that display GST-exclusive prices to Australian shoppers, shipping rates built on states when Australia Post bills by postcode and cubic volume, and a .com.au that the registrant isn't legally eligible to hold. None of them is hard. All of them are invisible until launch week, which is why a Shopify migration for Australia so often sits at 95% done for a fortnight while someone chases an ABN.
Here's how we set each one up, and where the traps are.
GST: 10%, and the price on the page includes it
GST is a flat 10% on most goods sold in Australia. No state variation, no product-category maze. The complexity isn't the rate, it's the display.
Australian consumer law requires the total price a shopper pays to be shown prominently. In practice that means your product page shows AUD 49.95, not AUD 45.41 plus tax at checkout. In Shopify that's the include tax in prices setting, and it changes what your entered price means: enter 49.95 and the GST component is 49.95 ÷ 11 = 4.54, leaving 45.41 ex-GST. Divide by 11, not 1.1. That single arithmetic slip has cost more than one merchant a margin conversation with their accountant.
The trap comes when the same store sells outside Australia. Shopify can adjust prices per country so non-AU buyers don't pay Australian tax, which takes your AUD 99 product to 99 ÷ 1.1 = 90.00 for a US shopper. Mathematically correct. Commercially ugly, because 90.00 is not a price anyone chose. If you sell across markets, set market-specific prices deliberately instead of letting the tax engine do your merchandising.
Two more settings people skip. Shipping is a taxable supply in Australia, so charge tax on shipping needs to be on. And if you're an overseas business, GST registration kicks in once your sales into Australia pass AUD 75,000 in a twelve-month period. For goods valued at AUD 1,000 or less, a registered overseas seller collects GST at checkout. Above that, it's generally handled at the border. Send a customer an unexpected customs bill on an order they thought was landed-price and you've bought yourself a refund and a review.
The tax invoice almost nobody configures
Shopify's default order confirmation email is a receipt, not an Australian tax invoice. Business customers will ask for one, and for sales above AUD 82.50 including GST they're entitled to it. A compliant invoice needs your ABN, the words "tax invoice", and the GST amount shown.
Fix it once in the notification templates and the order printer template, before launch. It takes an hour. Retrofitting it after three hundred B2B orders takes a lot longer.
Australia Post rates: your parcel weighs more than the scale says
Australia Post prices bulky-but-light parcels on cubic weight, using a conversion of 250 kg per cubic metre. A 40 × 30 × 20 cm box is 0.024 m³. Multiply by 250 and you get 6 kg of chargeable weight, even if the contents weigh 2.1 kg. If you sell homewares, pet beds, apparel in rigid boxes or anything with protective packaging, your real cost is set by the box, not the product.
Whether cubic pricing applies to every parcel depends on your Australia Post contract, so pull your own rate card before you model anything. But build the box dimensions into your Shopify product data from the start. Shipping apps and carrier integrations can't guess volume from weight.
Postcodes, not states
Shopify's native shipping zones for Australia give you states and territories. Australia Post prices by postcode zone, and the gap between Sydney metro and a regional WA postcode is not a rounding error. A flat "NSW" rate averages a delivery area that runs from Bondi to Broken Hill.
You have three honest options:
- Live carrier-calculated rates, pulling from Australia Post or a shipping platform. This needs a plan that supports third-party calculated shipping, which generally means Advanced or Plus, or annual billing. Confirm the current terms against your plan before you promise the client live rates, because this is the single most common thing an offshore build gets wrong at quote stage.
- Weight-based tiers with a deliberate blended rate, accepting you'll lose money on remote deliveries and make it back on metro. Perfectly reasonable if 80% of your volume ships to five capital cities.
- A shipping app that handles postcode-level zones and label generation together, which is where most Australian merchants end up once volume justifies it.
On free shipping thresholds, do the arithmetic rather than copying a competitor. If your blended parcel cost is AUD 12.40 and gross margin is 55%, an AUD 80 threshold nets 80 × 0.55 = 44.00 of margin, minus 12.40 for the freight, leaving 31.60. At an AUD 60 threshold that becomes 33.00 − 12.40 = 20.60. Both work. One of them works much better if the threshold also lifts average order value, which is the part you can only learn by testing.
Getting a .com.au when the company isn't Australian
This is the blocker that most often delays launch by weeks, because it's the only one you can't solve with a developer.
A .com.au licence requires an Australian presence. That usually means an ABN or ACN. A foreign company can also qualify through an Australian registered trade mark, but if you go that route the domain has to be an exact match to the words in the mark. "Sunrise Organics" as a registered mark does not get you sunriseorganicsau.com.au.
You also can't buy a .com.au inside Shopify. You register through an auDA-accredited registrar, then point the DNS at Shopify or connect it as a third-party domain. Budget for the registrar's identity checks, which can want documents your Indian or UK parent entity doesn't keep handy. Start this the week the project kicks off, not the week before launch.
If you already trade under an Australian entity, also look at whether the shorter .au direct name is worth holding defensively. It's cheap insurance against someone else taking it.
The migration itself: URLs first, products second
Plenty of Australian stores come to Shopify from Neto, BigCommerce or an old Magento build, and each has its own URL shape. Shopify forces /products/, /collections/ and /pages/ paths. Every legacy URL that had organic traffic needs a 301 to its Shopify equivalent, and "we'll redirect the top 100" is how you lose the long tail that was quietly earning revenue.
Our sequence on a Shopify migration: export the full URL list from Search Console and the old sitemap, map it before the theme is built, load redirects as a bulk CSV, then crawl the staging site to catch chains and loops. Product handles change when the old platform allowed characters Shopify doesn't. Category pages with filter parameters need a decision, not a redirect. Blog archives get forgotten by everyone.
Also check the review data. If you're carrying years of product reviews across, the import has to key on SKU rather than product title, because titles get cleaned up during a migration and reviews then attach to nothing.
Checkout expectations are not the ones you're used to
If your team's experience is Indian D2C, unlearn some of it. There is no COD in Australian eCommerce. Razorpay isn't in the picture. Shopify Payments handles cards natively, PayPal still converts well with older shoppers, and buy-now-pay-later — Afterpay and Zip in particular — is close to table stakes in fashion, beauty and homewares. BNPL merchant fees run several times what you pay on cards, so treat it as a customer acquisition cost and price accordingly rather than being surprised each month.
Delivery promise matters more than delivery speed. Australians are used to a few days in transit. What they won't tolerate is a vague estimate. Show a date range at checkout and honour it.
Cutting over from Bengaluru at 3am Sydney time
We run these launches from India, and the timezone works in the client's favour. Sydney is five and a half hours ahead of Bengaluru during daylight saving. A 3am AEDT cutover — the quietest hour on an Australian store — is 9:30pm IST. Our team is awake, the client is asleep, and by the time Sydney opens for business the DNS has propagated and the redirects are verified.
What we watch in the first 48 hours: 404s in Search Console, checkout completion rate hour by hour against the old platform's baseline, real shipping costs on the first fifty orders versus what the store charged, and GST totals in the tax report reconciling against order value. That last one catches the inclusive-pricing mistake within a day instead of at BAS time.
Speed usually needs attention too, particularly if the previous site was fast and shoppers noticed. Third-party scripts pile up during a migration because nobody wants to be the person who removed the tracking pixel. Audit them a fortnight after launch when the panic has subsided, or get a speed pass scheduled as part of the project.
Where to start this week
Confirm who holds, or can hold, the .com.au licence. That's the item with a real-world dependency and a queue attached to it. Then pull your Australia Post rate card and measure your five most-shipped cartons, because everything about your shipping configuration follows from those dimensions.
If you want a second pair of eyes on a store that's mid-build, our team in Bengaluru works with Australian brands on migrations and post-launch fixes, and a store audit will tell you which of the three blockers is actually going to bite you.