Shopify in French: admin and store

Article updated: August 21, 2026

You cannot switch Shopify to French from a single setting, and that is exactly where everyone gets it wrong. The admin interface is set from your user profile, while the store your customers see is set from Paramètres, Langues (Settings, Languages). The two settings are completely independent of each other. On the stores we take over for audits at Stellar Projects, roughly one in three still runs with an admin in English even though the team is entirely French-speaking: the setting exists, nobody ever found it. And there are not two, but four distinct language layers in Shopify. The table below lays them out once and for all.

We have been building and taking over Shopify stores since 2018, and today we support more than a hundred of them. Along with taxes, language configuration is the setting most often rushed through in five minutes at launch and the most expensive to fix two years later.

Switch Shopify to French in 3 clicks

To switch the Shopify admin interface to French, click your store name at the top of the screen, open your profile, select Français in the Preferred language menu, then save. This setting is tied to your user account: it changes neither your collaborators' language nor your online store's language.

You are probably reading this from an interface that is still in English. The exact labels are therefore given in both languages, so you can click without hesitation. If you are just discovering the platform, our Shopify training path walks through every screen from the beginning.

For the admin (your own interface):

1. Click your store name at the top of the screen, then your profile (your profile).
2. In the Langue préférée (Preferred language) block, open the Langue (Language) dropdown and choose Français.
3. Click Enregistrer (Save). The admin switches to French for your account only.

For the store (what your customers see):

1. From the admin, go to Paramètres (Settings), then Langues (Languages).
2. Find the store's default language. If it is not French, use the option to change the default language.
3. Save. The change is visible to all your visitors.

One caveat before you touch the second procedure: on a store that is already live, changing the default language is not a trivial setting. Shopify deletes the existing translations for the language you adopt, and your URL structure may change. The details are further down, and they are worth reading.

Admin, store, checkout: the four languages of Shopify

Shopify stacks four independent language layers: the admin interface, the store's default language, the additional published languages, and the notifications sent to your customers. Setting one never sets the other three, which is why an admin in French keeps sending emails in English.

A single Shopify store lets you sell in up to 20 languages, starting with the Basic plan and provided you use a theme that supports multiple languages. The Starter and (legacy) Lite plans are excluded. So it is almost never a question of budget, only a question of configuration and of content to translate.

Translate the Shopify admin interface

The Shopify admin interface, also called the back office, the dashboard or simply the Shopify admin, is available in 20 languages. The setting is tied to the user account, never to the store: each collaborator chooses their own, and changing yours has no effect on anyone else's.

The languages available for the admin are Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Spanish, Swedish, Thai and Turkish. Vietnamese, available for a long time, was removed from merchant interfaces on September 11, 2024.

This per-user logic is a real convenience for teams. On the same store, a developer can work in English because the technical documentation and the forums are in English, while an e-commerce manager runs the catalog in French. Nobody steps on anyone's toes.

Our internal rule at Stellar Projects is the opposite, though: we require the whole client team to use French when a project starts. Not on principle, out of pragmatism. Our training sessions, our tutorial videos and our meeting notes all use the same jargon. When a client looks for "Paramètres, Expéditions et livraisons" and their screen shows "Settings, Shipping and delivery", we lose ten minutes on every exchange. Volkier Bentinck, co-founder of Stellar Projects.

Where to find the Shopify admin

The Shopify admin is accessible from admin.shopify.com, with your Shopify account credentials. It is the backstage: products, orders, customers, theme, settings. The storefront, on the other hand, is your public domain name, the one your customers type. Two addresses, two worlds, and two language settings that have nothing to do with each other.

Admin, back office, dashboard: the same screen, three names

Merchants search for the same thing under three different words, and Shopify does not really help. The official documentation says Shopify admin. Agencies and forums talk about the Shopify back office. Analytics tools and integrators say dashboard, sometimes tableau de bord once the interface is switched to French. These are three names for a single screen, the one you open from admin.shopify.com.

The distinction is worth knowing when you look for help: a query in English for "Shopify admin" brings up the vendor's documentation, while a query in French for "back office Shopify" mostly brings up agency content. On translation and advanced configuration topics, the first route is almost always the fastest, even if your interface is in French.

The back office in French: what stays in English

Even with an admin fully switched to French, several areas of your back office will remain in English. It is not a bug, it is a scope limit: Shopify only translates what belongs to it. Everything that comes from a third-party vendor, from technical documentation or from your own theme falls outside the setting.

• Third-party app interfaces. They are translated by their vendor, not by Shopify. On a typical French stack that we install at Stellar Projects, only 2 to 3 apps out of 10 actually offer an interface in French. This is by far the leading source of leftover English in a back office.
• Technical documentation and Liquid code. The names of objects, filters and tags in the template language remain in English by nature. No translation is planned, nor would it be desirable.
• Some report and analytics labels. The most technical dimensions and metrics often keep their original name.
• API error messages and technical logs. They are aimed at developers and are not localized.
• Your theme content. This is the classic trap: "Add to cart", "Sold out" or "Checkout" do not depend on the admin language but on the theme's editorial content, which is edited from the online store, in the theme's default content. This is worth settling as early as your theme labels, when you choose it. It is also where you remove the Powered by Shopify mention, which often remains in English in the footer.

The rule we draw from this is simple: the language of an app's interface is not a selection criterion, the language of what it displays to your customers is, and it is the only one of the two that costs sales. A review widget or a cart reminder in English on a French-language funnel costs you conversions, an app dashboard in English only costs you comfort.

Saying this is not admitting a weakness of the platform. It is simply the information nobody gives before the merchant discovers it alone, on a Tuesday evening, trying to figure out why their checkout flow mixes two languages.

Switch the store to French for your customers

Your store's language is set in Settings, Languages, and comes down to two notions not to be confused: the default language and the published languages. The default language drives the theme and the checkout. Published languages are the additional translations your customers can choose, each on its own URL.

• The default language is the one displayed when no translation exists. It is the foundation: if you only have a French-speaking market, it is the only setting that matters.
• Published languages create distinct URLs such as your-domain.com/fr or your-domain.com/de. The default language, on the other hand, has no prefix. Shopify automatically adds the corresponding hreflang tags and includes all published languages in your sitemaps.

Additional languages are added directly in Settings, Languages. Shopify Markets then comes in to assign them market by market, with a default language specific to each market, and to choose between subfolders, subdomains or separate domains. Our guide to managing multiple languages with Shopify Markets details the full mechanics, currencies included.

One thing you absolutely do not want to discover in production: changing the default language of a store that is already live deletes the existing translations for the language you adopt. Switching from English as the default to French as the default therefore erases the French translations you have already entered. Always export your translations before the operation. And since the structure of translated URLs changes at the same time, there are consequences for your SEO to anticipate, redirects included. This setting is decided before launch, not after.

Translate notifications, emails and the checkout

Shopify's transactional emails do not follow your admin language. They are sent in the language in which the customer placed their order, provided a translation exists. This is the point that surprises merchants the most: back office in French, order confirmations in English.

The templates are managed from Settings, Notifications, and translated with the official Translate & Adapt app, free and published by Shopify, which also handles products, collections, pages, articles, theme content and URL handles. Its automatic translation, however, is capped at two languages: beyond that, you have to enter or import the translations.

Four families of notifications need checking after any language change:

• Order notifications: confirmation, shipping confirmation, tracking update, refund.
• Customer account notifications: activation, welcome, password reset.
• Abandoned cart reminders, which often go out with a default template nobody has ever reread.
• Internal team notifications: new order, low stock, fulfillment. They follow a separate logic and frequently remain in English.

Use this review to also check the sender address of your emails: a perfectly translated message sent from a generic address loses half its impact.

The checkout, for its part, benefits from 33 languages pre-translated by Shopify. Your customers see it in their language without you having to enter a single string. The customizations you add to it, however, remain your responsibility: custom fields, shipping notices, checkout extensions. That is exactly where the most visible language mix-ups hide, on the last screen, the one that decides the sale.

The mistakes that break a multilingual store

Four mistakes come up systematically in the audits of multilingual Shopify stores we carry out at Stellar Projects: changing the default language after launch, publishing a language without translating the metadata, leaving apps in English, forgetting hreflang. None of them is theoretical, all of them have a measurable cost.

The first one deserves a closer look, because its damage is widely underestimated. Shopify documents the deletion of translations, but not what it takes with it. What we have seen in the field: on a recent migration, a complete set of transactional email templates built with OrderlyEmails was wiped out by a simple change of default language. Everything had to be rebuilt, template by template, for a setting that takes three seconds to check.

URL structure is the other point to watch, and how serious it is depends on the translation app you choose. On this specific project, the combination of Translate & Adapt for native translations, Matrixify for bulk export and re-import of URL handles, and an AI assistant to produce the slugs, made it possible to translate every URL in a catalog at a negligible cost compared with a manual rework. It is now our default method on multilingual migrations.

Nearly all four of these mistakes can be prevented at the same point: before you even open the store, when a language decision still costs nothing.

Setting Shopify's language takes three clicks. Setting the language of an e-commerce project takes half a day of scoping, and saves you six months of catching up. If you want to see what a store that made these decisions at the right time looks like, check out successful French Shopify stores: what they all have in common is that they settled the language question before going live, never after.