Shopify SEO in Australia: The Pricing Rule That’s Actually Law

GST-inclusive pricing is a legal requirement, not a preference

This is the rule most overseas sellers miss. Still, it applies the moment you sell to Australian consumers.

The ACCC states it plainly: “Businesses must display the total price of a product or service as a single figure,” and that total “includes taxes, duties and all unavoidable or pre-selected extra fees.” So a product page showing an ex-GST price with tax added later at checkout does not meet the requirement.

There is one carve-out. If you display prices only to other businesses, GST does not have to be included. But consumer-facing prices get no such exemption.

Finally, the ACCC adds a prominence rule too. If you show a partial price alongside the total, “the total price must be at least as prominent as the partial price.” So a large ex-GST figure with a small inclusive one underneath is exactly the pattern the rule exists to stop.

In Shopify terms, this is a market settings job rather than an SEO one, but it lands on the same product pages. Set your Australian market to show tax-inclusive prices before you worry about anything below.

One honest caveat, because this is where confident blog posts start inventing things. We are not lawyers, and nothing here is legal advice. The ACCC publishes its own guidance for businesses, and that is the place to check your specific setup.

Australia’s online market is bigger than most guides assume

Australia gets treated as a small English-speaking afterthought. The spending figures say otherwise.

Two details in that report matter more than the headline. Households now buy from an average of 16 different brands a year, and the average basket has shrunk to $96. So the pattern is more orders, from more sellers, at lower values.

So that rewards breadth of catalogue coverage rather than a handful of hero products. It also means marketplaces are real competition: shoppers put $18.9 billion through them last year, up 13%.

Bing is worth more in Australia than you would assume

Google dominates, as everywhere. But the runner-up is not a rounding error here.

Bing at 9.41% sits close to Canada’s share and well above Germany’s. So submitting your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools is worth the ten minutes it takes, especially since Bing also feeds Copilot.

Google at 87.58% is lower than the 90-plus figures quoted in a lot of older Australian SEO content. In other words, roughly one search in eight happens somewhere other than Google.

Australian English is a real keyword difference

This is the one genuine language issue, and it is easy to miss because the site still reads fine.

Specifically, Australian English follows British spelling. If your product copy says “jewelry” and your buyers type “jewellery”, you are invisible for the term they actually search. The same applies to colour, organise, optimise, fibre and metre.

It bites hardest in a few categories. Jewellery, fashion, homewares, beauty and anything sold in colour variants are where the spelling sits inside the money keyword rather than off to the side.

Be realistic about tooling here. No SEO app on Shopify detects regional spelling variants for you, ours included. You find them manually — search your own store for “jewelry”, “color” and “organize” — and then fix them at scale once you know where they are.

Be honest about what you can rank for

Local intent does not mean easy. Check the terms before you build a plan around them.

Pulled for Australia rather than the US default, “shopify seo australia” runs about 400 searches a month. That is a real but modest term, and it is the one this page targets.

“seo australia” is a different proposition at 900 searches and difficulty 46, and its parent topic resolves to an Australian agency brand. That is agency territory, not a page you win with a product catalogue. Aim at the terms your products actually answer instead.

Your shopify seo australia checklist

In order, starting with the one that is not optional.

1. Set your Australian market to display tax-inclusive prices, as a single total figure.
2. Check no page shows a prominent ex-GST price with the total in smaller type.
3. Search your store for US spellings and list every hit in product titles, collection names, meta fields and alt text.
4. Fix those spellings across the catalogue, then keep the Australian spelling in new product copy.
5. Submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools as well as Google Search Console.
6. State delivery times and who pays return postage on the product page, since distance is a real objection here.
7. Write descriptive meta titles for your top collections before touching anything further down the catalogue.

Where Plug In SEO fits

The spelling fix is the part that scales badly by hand. That is the honest use case here.

Once you have identified your US spellings manually, Plug In SEO’s bulk meta editor applies corrected titles and descriptions across the catalogue from one template, using variables like %% product.title %% so each page keeps its own name. Its Scanner separately flags pages with thin or missing titles and descriptions, which is usually where the work starts. For the writing side, see our guide to Shopify meta titles and descriptions.

Which guide you need

Australia is an English market with a pricing-law wrinkle. The other markets differ in their own ways.

The UK shares the spelling conventions but not the tax display rule. Canada adds a genuine language obligation in Quebec. Germany is a translation and hreflang problem, and India turns on payment behaviour.