Since Shopify switched on Multi-Currency Payouts for eligible Shopify Payments merchants in Australia on 11 September 2026, you can be paid in a currency other than AUD. Thirteen of them. Here is the decision most Australian merchants should make: hold USD if you have real USD outgoings, hold NZD if your New Zealand revenue clears roughly A$15,000 a month, and take everything else in Australian dollars. Adding a payout currency moves the conversion cost from Shopify to your bank. It does not remove it, and below a certain volume the bookkeeping costs more than the spread you save.
What changed, and what stayed exactly the same
Before this, an AUD store selling in NZD through Shopify Markets took the order in NZD, and Shopify converted it to AUD before it hit your bank, charging a currency conversion fee on the way through. You never saw New Zealand dollars. Now you can nominate NZD as a payout currency, point it at a bank account that accepts NZD, and receive the money unconverted.
Nothing about your storefront changes. Your Markets configuration, your presentment currencies, your price rounding, your local domain structure — all untouched. Afterpay and Zip volume is overwhelmingly domestic and settles in AUD regardless, so your Australian checkout is unaffected. This is a treasury change, not a merchandising one.
The currency list in your admin is the authoritative one, and it will shift over time. The ones that matter to most Australian merchants are USD, NZD, GBP, EUR, SGD, CAD and HKD. Check Settings → Payments → Payouts rather than trusting any blog post, including this one.
Where the FX cost moves: Shopify Payments to your bank
Shopify Payments charges a currency conversion fee whenever the presentment currency differs from the payout currency. The percentage depends on your region and shows on your Shopify Payments settings page — look it up, don't assume. For the arithmetic below I've used 2%, which is in the right neighbourhood for an Australian account converting a foreign presentment currency. Substitute your real number.
Take the payout in the same currency the customer paid in and that fee disappears from the transaction. In its place you get one of three outcomes:
- You convert to AUD at your bank. A foreign currency account at one of the big four will typically cost you more than the rate you see on Google; a business account with Wise or Airwallex is usually cheaper. Either way, you now control the timing.
- You spend the currency without converting it. This is where the money actually is. A US supplier invoice, a US-based 3PL, an ad account billed in USD — pay it out of your USD balance and you have skipped two conversions, not one.
- You sit on the balance and the exchange rate moves. That is a position, whether you meant to take one or not.
The volume test, with the arithmetic shown
Take a store doing around A$200,000 a month, with cross-border revenue split roughly: NZ$40,000, US$25,000 and S$6,000 per month.
New Zealand. At NZ$1 = A$0.92, NZ$40,000 is about A$36,800. A 2% conversion fee is A$736 a month. Receive NZD instead and convert at your bank at a 0.5% spread and you pay A$184. Saving: A$552 a month, A$6,624 a year. Worth doing.
United States. At US$1 = A$1.52, US$25,000 is about A$38,000. The 2% fee is A$760 a month. Now suppose US$15,000 of monthly cost is billed to you in USD — stock, freight, software. Paying those from a USD balance avoids both the 2% coming in and the bank spread you'd otherwise pay buying USD, call it 0.5–1%. On A$22,800 of that, you save somewhere between A$570 and A$684 a month. The remaining US$10,000 converts to AUD at your bank: 1.5% better than Shopify's rate on A$15,200 is A$228. Total, roughly A$800–900 a month.
Singapore. At S$1 = A$1.14, S$6,000 is A$6,840. The 2% fee is A$137. A bank spread of 0.6% is A$41. You save A$96 a month, A$1,152 a year — against opening another account, reconciling another currency every month, and revaluing another balance at EOFY. Your bookkeeper will eat most of that. Leave it in AUD.
The pattern falls out of those three. Below about A$15,000 a month in a given currency, the saving lands under A$250 a month and the admin overhead swallows it. Above A$15,000, take the payout. The exception that overrides the threshold entirely: if you pay bills in that currency, hold it regardless of volume, because avoiding the round trip is worth more than any spread arbitrage.
Across all three currencies in this example you're looking at roughly A$16,000 a year — about a point of margin on cross-border revenue. Not transformative. Real.
Getting a bank account that will actually accept the payout
This is the part that stalls setups. Shopify needs an account that can receive the nominated currency, and not every Australian banking arrangement qualifies.
Foreign currency accounts from NAB, CBA, Westpac and ANZ work, though the monthly fees and conversion spreads vary enough that it's worth a call to your relationship manager before you pick. Wise Business and Airwallex give you local receiving details in USD, GBP, EUR, NZD and SGD, usually at better rates, and we've seen those accepted. Usually. Verification occasionally bounces on account-name matching, so do a test: enable one currency, let one payout cycle land, confirm it cleared, then enable the rest. We get the first attempt wrong often enough that the staged approach saves a fortnight.
One structural catch: currencies you haven't nominated still convert to AUD the old way. You're not forced into all-or-nothing, which is the right design, but it does mean your payout reporting now has multiple streams to reconcile. If you're on Xero or MYOB, multi-currency sits on a higher plan tier. Budget for that before you decide SGD is worth holding.
Shopify Markets pricing in NZD and USD from an Australian store
Payout currency and presentment currency are separate settings, and plenty of merchants conflate them. Markets controls what the customer sees. Payouts control what lands in your account. You can show NZD prices and still be paid in AUD; the new feature just lets you stop doing that.
If you haven't set presentment pricing up properly, do that first, because it moves conversion rate far more than payout currency moves margin. Three things worth getting right:
- Price rounding. Auto-converted prices produce things like NZ$43.17. Set rounding to .95 or .99 per market. It looks priced, not translated.
- Per-market price adjustments. A flat percentage uplift on US prices to cover the freight differential is cleaner than trying to recover it in shipping, where it kills the cart. An A$28 Australia Post parcel to California on a A$60 order is the real constraint on US expansion, not FX.
- Duties and import fees at checkout. For the US and Singapore, collecting at checkout rather than letting the carrier bill the customer on delivery is the single biggest reduction in cross-border refund requests we see.
Sendle and Australia Post both handle international, but model the WA and regional domestic legs too — a national flat rate that works for Sydney and Melbourne can quietly lose money on every Perth and Darwin order. If your Markets setup needs rebuilding rather than tweaking, that's a developer job; our Shopify work for Australian merchants covers that end of it.
Eligibility for multi-currency payouts
You need Shopify Payments as your processor — a third-party gateway doesn't participate. Your store needs to be based in Australia with the account in good standing, and you need the receiving bank account for each currency you nominate. If the option isn't showing in your payments settings, you're not eligible yet; rollouts of this kind arrive in waves rather than everywhere at once, and support can tell you where you sit.
Worth saying plainly: if your cross-border revenue is under A$10,000 a month total, this isn't a priority. The money is in AOV and repeat rate, which is where it always is for Australian brands given the size of the domestic market. Fix those first.
GST on foreign currency sales
Receiving USD doesn't change your Australian obligations. Your BAS is reported in Australian dollars, so foreign currency sales must be translated using an exchange rate method the ATO accepts, applied consistently. Shopify's reports will give you AUD equivalents, but the rate Shopify used and the rate your accountant applies may differ, and the gap shows up as an FX adjustment.
Goods exported to overseas customers are generally GST-free provided they leave Australia within the required window and you keep the evidence. That's the export side. The import side is separate: Australia's low-value imported goods rules put 10% GST on sub-A$1,000 goods sold into Australia by overseas sellers, which matters if you're also shipping into the country from an offshore entity.
Selling outward, you may pick up obligations in the destination. New Zealand applies GST to low-value imported goods with a registration threshold based on your supplies to New Zealand consumers. Singapore has an overseas vendor registration regime with its own thresholds. The US has no federal consumption tax but state-level economic nexus rules that trigger on sales volume into each state. None of these are triggered by holding a payout currency — they're triggered by selling — but merchants often discover them at the same time, because that's when the cross-border numbers finally become visible on one screen. Take the list to your accountant with twelve months of sales by destination country.
What holding foreign currency doesn't fix, and what it breaks
Refunds get cleaner. A refund issued six weeks after the order no longer has an FX mismatch between what you received and what you return, because both legs are in the same currency. Same for chargebacks. That's a genuine, underrated benefit.
What gets worse: you now carry currency positions. Hold a USD balance through Click Frenzy and into the summer Christmas peak and a 3% move in the AUD against your balance is a real gain or loss sitting on your balance sheet. At EOFY your accountant has to revalue it. That's not a reason to avoid it — it's a reason to set a policy. Ours for merchants who ask: convert down to a working balance monthly, sized to cover the next two months of that currency's outgoings, and don't try to time the rate. You run a store, not a treasury desk.
The other thing it doesn't fix is cross-border economics generally. Multi-currency payouts recovers a point or so of margin on international revenue. Freight to the US, duty handling, returns logistics and the cost of acquiring a customer in a market where nobody has heard of you are all much bigger numbers. And if you make sustainability or provenance claims to differentiate in those markets, the ACCC's position on substantiation applies to your Australian store whatever currency it's priced in.
Where to start this week
Export your last twelve months of Shopify Payments payouts and group them by presentment currency. Take the AUD-equivalent total for each, multiply by the conversion fee on your settings page, and you have the annual amount in play per currency. Then list your foreign-currency outgoings against it. Any currency where the saving clears about A$3,000 a year, or where you have bills to pay in it, goes on the list. Everything else stays in AUD.
If the Markets side needs work before the payout side is worth bothering with, a store audit will tell you where the cross-border leakage actually sits — and it is usually in shipping thresholds and duty handling, not in the exchange rate.