Should I start with a marketplace like Amazon Global, my own Shopify store, or both?
The short answer
For your first international market, a marketplace usually wins because it removes the two hardest problems at once, cross-border logistics and getting a stranger to trust a brand they've never heard of. Amazon Global Selling (or FBA in-country) gives you built-in traffic, local fulfillment and returns while you validate demand; a Shopify Markets own-store makes sense once you know a market works and want to own the customer, margin and data. Most Indian brands that scaled abroad ran marketplace-first, then layered their own D2C site on top.
A quick summary to orient you. The real value is below: the resources worth your time, from people who've actually done it, not us.
Here are the resources
Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time. India-specific ones carry a badge.
Why we picked it
A clean four-step walkthrough, register, list, ship via FBA or self-fulfil, get paid, that answers 'how does the mechanics actually work' better than any third-party blog.
Why we picked it
Goes a level deeper into the mechanics that trip brands up, customs, duties, multi-currency, and how Managed Markets can handle duties/taxes at checkout automatically.
Why we picked it
The most concrete India-founder account of going global, Vahdam's Bala Sarda built a brand where cross-border is ~90% of revenue, broken into nine tactical points on timing, differentiation, inventory and pricing.
Why we picked it
The native way to set genuinely market-specific pricing and currency per country from a single Shopify backend, instead of a flat FX-converted price that ignores local duty and competition.
