FAQs | Orbe - Help center

What are the main differences between Geolocation by Shopify and Orbe?

Orbe introduces a streamlined, customizable popup that seamlessly aligns with your brand guidelines, enhancing the overall user experience. Distinct from the Shopify Geolocation app, here are the key disparities:

Continuous Functionality: Orbe ensures ongoing accuracy by confirming the customer's correct shopping experience. This prevents accidental visits to alternate experiences featuring distinct prices, products, content, currencies, or languages. Unlike the Shopify Geolocation App, which operates only during the initial visit and lacks the capability for automatic redirections, leading to certain issues.
Consent Management: Orbe records user consent, preventing the popup from reappearing during subsequent visits and guaranteeing consistent placement within the appropriate experience.
Customization Power: Our popups are fully customizable, allowing you to tailor the appearance and content of the geolocation recommendation popup directly from the Shopify Theme Editor. Titles and text can be adjusted to cater to diverse languages.
Multi-Store Geolocation: Orbe effortlessly links with multiple Shopify stores, directing customers to their ideal shopping experience through geolocation.
Country Selector: Orbe empowers users to adjust their preferences by offering a market selector.
Integration with Klaviyo: Orbe integrates with Klaviyo, enabling the transmission of user preferences to personalize email campaigns based on preferred language and country.
Built for Shopify: Orbe proudly bears the 'Built for Shopify' emblem, a distinction recognizing top-tier apps within the Shopify App Store for performance, speed, and design.
Robust Support: Our customer support is accessible from 9 am to 6 pm (CET Time), Monday to Friday. Our app boasts a sterling 5-star rating, a testament to the appreciation shared by numerous merchants.

In essence, Orbe Geolocation not only offers a sophisticated solution but also consistently surpasses the capabilities of the Shopify Geolocation app, providing a comprehensive and tailored geolocation experience for your customers.

How can I customise the style of the welcome Orbe popup?

Orbe works with the last version of Shopify themes. It means that once you install Orbe in your store, you can customise the look and feel of your popup inside the Shopify Theme Editor.

Is it possible to showcase 'Markets' instead of 'Countries' in the geolocation popup?

Due to technical constraints and limitations within Shopify Markets, Orbe is unable to display markets instead of countries in the geolocation popup. While Shopify Markets allows grouping experiences by market, it has been primarily built at the country level. Let's consider a scenario where a brand has four available markets: the United States, the United Kingdom, a market labeled Europe encompassing Spain, France, Italy, and Germany, and finally, a market named Rest of the World covering all other countries. In this context, the brand wishes the popup to show only four options: the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, and Rest of the World.

Since Shopify Markets has been structured at the country level, every redirection by Orbe must be specific to an individual country. For instance, assuming my store is named https://mystore.com, in the case of Europe, when redirecting to a market, we add the parameter "?country=CountryCode" to the URL. This implies that redirecting to each country within Europe will be distinct. Thus, we have the following URL structure:

Spain: https://mystore.com/?country=ES
France: https://mystore.com/?country=FR
Italy: https://mystore.com/?country=IT
Germany: https://mystore.com/?country=DE

Shopify Markets itself allows grouping markets by countries for organizational simplicity. However, from the buyer's perspective, it does not permit redirection to a specific market using any parameter, despite potential variations in prices (due to differing taxes) or product availability, among other factors, across countries within the same market.

If any application redirects to a market instead of a country, it is not fully compatible with Shopify Markets, potentially leading to issues with customers.

Is it possible to implement automatic redirections instead of showing a popup?

At Orbe, we implement automatic redirections during second and subsequent visits once user consent has been obtained. We refrain from using automatic redirections during the initial visit due to their potential negative impacts on:

SEO Considerations: Given that prominent web crawlers, including Google, primarily operate from the US, it's crucial to weigh the implications of automatic redirection without user permission. Such redirections can potentially hinder the complete visibility of your localized experiences. This may result in the incomplete exploration and understanding of your region-specific content and offerings by Google and other search engines.
Global Data Protection Laws: In regions with stringent data protection regulations like the European Union (under GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation) and California (under CCPA, the California Consumer Privacy Act), automatic redirections without explicit user consent are often not compliant. It's paramount to uphold users' privacy rights and secure their consent before leveraging personal information for automatic redirections.

Does Orbe appear twice to the user?

No, it doesn’t. When an international user visits your store, ORBE will recommend moving them to the localised experience. In the subsequent visits, as ORBE saved the consent, it will automatically redirect them to that experience.

Can I use Orbe with multiple expansion stores?

Yes, you can, and it is our most popular use case. If you pay for the Plus Plan in one of your stores, you can connect a maximum of four different Shopify stores and redirect the traffic to the right shopping experience. If you have over four Shopify stores, please contact our team at support@orbe.app to request a custom plan.

Does Orbe allow redirecting with the full path of the URL?

Yes, it does. It’s an advanced setting you can enable. If a merchant connects two different Shopify stores and both have the same URL structure, can enable this feature so if, for example, a British user goes to example.fr/collections/all, it will be redirected to example.co.uk/collections/all.

Does Orbe allow efficient UTM tracking when there is a redirection?

Yes, it does. For example, if a French user access to the United States experience with a UTM parameter from a Facebook ad: https://store.com/?utm_content=textlink&utm_source=facebook, Orbe will redirect the user to the French experience maintaining the full path in the URL: https://store.fr/?utm_content=textlink&utm_source=facebook.

In this way, Orbe guarantees that the store owner does not lose the traffic attribution for all their media campaigns.

Is Orbe compatible with other apps?

Yes, it is. Orbe works seamlessly with Shopify Markets. So, any app that works perfectly with Shopify Markets is integrated with Orbe.

Does Orbe add a footer selector?

Yes, in the footer of your website, you can choose between the classic or the selector with a popup where you will show the flags of all the countries where you sell.

Does Orbe have a Free plan or Trial plan?

You can use our geolocation service for free, up to 500 successfully redirected users per month. If you'd like more time to evaluate our service before making a decision, we offer free trials:

For Monthly plans, you'll enjoy a 7-day free trial. If you decide to cancel your plan within these seven days, you won't incur any charges.
With Yearly plans, we provide a 15-day free trial. Should you choose to cancel your plan during the first 15 days, there will be no charges applied.

What happens if I want to cancel my subscription?

You can cancel the paid plan at any time. You will only be charged for the last month you used Orbe.

Why is the Orbe cookie an essential cookie according to data protection laws?

The Orbe cookie is classified as an essential cookie based on data protection laws as it's designed to store the user's country and language preferences. These preferences are essential for providing a seamless and customized experience for visitors to merchant stores using our app.

Let's delve into the reasons why:

Personalized User Experience: When our app is installed on merchant stores, we embed our technology to enable the selection of country and language preferences through a pop-up window. The Orbe cookie is crucial for remembering these preferences, ensuring visitors are seamlessly redirected to content tailored to their chosen country and language. By doing so, we enhance their overall experience.
GDPR Compliance: According to data protection laws, essential cookies are exempted from the requirement of obtaining explicit user consent. These cookies are deemed necessary for the proper functioning of the website or application and do not compromise user privacy. In this context, the Orbe cookie for saving country and language preferences falls under the category of essential cookies.
Legitimate Interest and User Expectations: The concept of legitimate interest, as defined in Article 6(1)(f) of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), allows the processing of personal data when the interests of the data controller align with the reasonable expectations of the data subjects. The Orbe cookie's purpose aligns with this concept, as it fulfills the user's expectation of a personalized experience based on their chosen country and language preferences. For more information on legitimate interests, please refer to the GDPR recital 47.
Merchant Benefits: For our merchant, the Orbe cookie plays a vital role in enhancing their customers' experience by providing localized content. This, in turn, can positively impact conversion rates and customer satisfaction. It ensures that visitors are seamlessly directed to the relevant content without unnecessary disruptions, creating a more efficient and user-friendly shopping environment.

It is crucial to note that we are committed to transparent data protection practices. The Orbe cookie is solely dedicated to storing country and language preferences and does not collect additional personal information without explicit consent.

Please keep in mind that while this information reflects our understanding of data protection laws, it's advisable to seek legal advice for accurate interpretation and compliance with specific regulations and local laws.

What is the behaviour of Shopify Markets when a user transitions from the storefront cart to the checkout?

As explained by the Shopify Markets team:

If the user does not use Orbe or any selector in their theme to choose a country in the storefront, Shopify will automatically geolocate the country during checkout. However, suppose the user intentionally selects a different country than the default in any selector on the storefront. In that case, Shopify respects that selection and sets it as the default country in the checkout.

For example, suppose a customer enters the storefront without selecting their market in Orbe and is located in a different country than the one they are visiting. In that case, the checkout will automatically change to their IP country and the user's preferred language.

Consider a specific example: Suppose a user does not use the Orbe popup or any country selector in their theme and is visiting your store's British experience in English. This user wants to ship their order to the UK. However, the user is located in France, and their preferred browser language is French (both available in another experience of your store). Once the user proceeds to the checkout, it will automatically switch to their location and language, despite being in a different store experience.

We hope this information clarifies any questions about the behaviour of Shopify Markets during the transition from the storefront cart to the checkout screen. If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.