The "Euro Thieves"

Charging Euro's for Dollars

[FrankWeb]

Recently I have started to notice that some sites are 'scamming' the general European public.

Now I know scamming might be over the top, but judge yourself. I visit a website through a US located IP address it shows for instance 'price $99'. I visit the same site from my European IP address and now it shows 'price €99'.

That is 1,55 x the regular price for software and in this case it was a ssl certificate. (on on top of this they will still charge the VAT)

Be aware of this 'scam' as I call it, since their is not legit reason to charge so much more for a e-service.

Let me know if you have had similar experiences.

[topr8]

adobe and macromedia( that was) were notorious for charging euros and brits much more than the yanks! ... for the exact same downloadable product.

it's been rife with software and downloadables for years.

[vincevincevince]

When you pay for a transaction with your credit card, denominated in euros, you get no extra charges (assuming your card is also denominated in euros).

Unfortunately, the US merchant does have to pay. First of all your euro is converted at a rather poor rate, then there are conversion charges of another few percentage sale value, and on top of that often a cross-border charge.

Tomorrow, the euro could drop a lot against the dollar. The guy who converted at market rates today will lose out, whilst the guy who added a margin will still be okay.

When you ask for support you are more likely to phone right at the end of the day due to time differences, and it's also true you are more likely to have poor english which means it takes much more time to deal with your queries.

Finally, when the US merchant's accountant turns up, he now has to deal with another whole set of paperwork denominated in euros. His invoices in euros need to be tied into his accounting in US$.

I can quite believe that for many merchants, the cost of dealing with foreign currencies is in the region of the 50% difference between euro and US$.

[Jack_Hughes]

+1 for the accounting costs...at least 50% of our admin effort goes into dealing with intra-currency conversions. Though, I did see one big supplier charging £=$ prices yesterday which I thought a little excessive.

[topr8]

>>at least 50% of our admin effort goes into dealing with intra-currency conversions

i take your point but how is that?

i have 3 merchant accounts: $, pound and euro

the customer is billed in their currency and our account is credited daily in pounds for each currency, eg 3 direct deposits a day.

there is trivial extra work related to accounting, but i'm willing to accept that other companies do it differently. [basically daily the credited amounts relating to the dollars and euros are entered in the database manually eg 2 entries, then all the sales from that day are automatically calculated into their stirling equivalents for our accounting purposes]

[Jack_Hughes]

@topr8 - what about purchases? Don't you buy in multiple currencies too? We sell in Euros & pounds and purchase in Pounds, Euros and Dollars. It's a frickin nightmare...

[topr8]

yes, we do buy in ukpounds and euros (very rarely dollars), that side is more complex yes i agree, but that has nothing to do with people buying FROM us.

my issue is big companies like adobe, who charge considerably more for downloadable products in the uk than the usa (or at least they did the last time i bought something that way)