Multiple currencies

[chabrenas]

We are starting a new website, part of which is an online shop. We expect most of our customers to live in USA, UK and mainland Europe, and were considering offering the option of paying in US dollars, GBP or Euros.

1. Do any forum members have experience of running a multi-currency shop?

2. I know that banks can provide multicurrency accounts and Payment Processors such as Secure Trading can provide an interface to them. Does anyone know of a Shopping Cart that handles multiple currencies? (Most of them require you to purchase one licence for each currency and run multiple carts, but it may also make sense to have separate pages for each currency).

3. Does anyone have a feel for whether US customers would be more willing to buy if they can pay in dollars (and hence know exactly how much they are paying)?

[Scott-CopyandDesign]

Make Paypal your payment provider. You can offer numerous currencies and it automatically gets changed to your default currency when it's entered into your Paypal account.

[bmedia]

You can do this with most new carts but things like oscommerce have a LIVE exchange rate module or X-cart.com do a good package

You also need to make sure you have a great shipping module because muti country, multi currency needs planning :)

[chabrenas]

Thanks, folks. I'll check out your suggestions. Has anyone any opinions (or, better, quantifiable experience) concerning the value of offering multi-currency trading?

[fastfences]

Hi Chab,
I only recently explored this, and Streamline will do it for £50.00 per extra currency. So if you're using £'s, that's included in the deal, add on euros and US dollars and you'll pay an extra £100.

cheers, Nigel

[chabrenas]

Thanks, Nigel. So what were you doing about a shopping cart to handle multi-currency pricing?

[fastfences]

Thanks, Nigel. So what were you doing about a shopping cart to handle multi-currency pricing?

That's up to my designer, Dean at www.c2webdesign.co.uk, who'll run it in conjunction with Protx.

Cheers, Nigel

[dan_moore]

I think its worth offering multiple currencies. I built an ebook site for a customer a few years ago that initially displayed prices in just sterling. From the web stats it turned out about 70% of visitors were from outside the UK.

I wrote a simple script that displayed all payment info in dollars, euros or sterling depending on the apparent location of each visitor to the site based on IP (with a link to each of the other currency options as of course the country the IP address resolves to isn't always the same as that of the actual viewer) and the purchases doubled as a result. So certainly worth trying.

Cheers

Dan