Why does a link in my product description send shoppers back to the default market?

Reproduce the selected-market journey

A fictional customer opens a cup product in the store’s French market and follows “See our size guide.” The description contains a full URL to the primary store domain. The size guide opens, but the customer is no longer in the intended market context. A reachable page is not enough to establish the correct journey.

Record the selected market, starting page and actual stored link. Shopify’s rich text documentation describes this issue for applicable Markets configurations. Check your store setup before changing links. Avoid interpreting an old editor preview or a remembered administrator session as the public shopper experience.

The current Shopify troubleshooting passage describes Markets with subfolders and the Geolocation app. Treat that as the documented setup, not evidence that every market/domain architecture behaves the same way. Record your actual configuration and the final shopper context. An administrator being signed in, or an old preview retaining a locale, is not a substitute for that journey.

Classify the destination

For the fictional size guide, compare the current full-domain URL with the intended internal page path. Keep the link text unchanged during the technical test so the reviewer is evaluating destination context rather than a new invitation. Do not shorten a supplier URL into a path on your own store.

Repair one draft link and test

1. Use the store editor to inspect the description’s actual link target.
2. Replace the internal full URL with a suitable reviewed short path where the configuration supports it.
3. Save the draft and start a fresh shopper journey in the intended market.
4. Follow the link and inspect the resulting locale and shopping context.

Repeat the same journey in another relevant market if the link is shared across them. For this fictional cup, ask the reviewer to find the right size guide without manually changing region again. A relative path is a configuration choice, not a guarantee that every theme or custom domain behaves identically.

For an internal page, a reviewed example is /pages/size-guide, with the real current page handle. Shopify documents short internal links beginning with /. Do not replace it with an unreviewed bare pages/size-guide, a hard-coded regional prefix, or a supplier URL stripped of its hostname. The label, target resource and expected market should be explicit before editing.

A translated page alone does not prove the intended selling market or currency. Note a deliberate fallback if the target is unavailable in that locale. This is a proposed test record; the article did not configure Markets or execute the shopper journey.

Approve the link map with the copy

Save the approved label, path, applicable markets and observed result. When descriptions are reused, review their links as well as their sentences. An otherwise accurate translation can carry an old destination that breaks the shopper’s selected context.

Keep price, delivery and policy expectations under the store owner’s review after navigation. This guide does not implement Markets or manage redirects, and CartVisual does not edit your store links. The completed artifact is a tested description-link map for the intended journey. Use the broader CTA guide to check whether the destination also delivers the task promised by the link wording.

If links are repaired through a CSV update, preserve the matching product identity and unrelated field values. A correct href inside the editor is only one checkpoint; verify the saved public link and destination after the authorized update.