Currency targeting using user IP address

[olly]

We are thinking of implementing a routine which inspects the user's IP address, determines the user's geographic location, and then displays prices in the currency most strongly associated with that region.

Is there anything to bear in mind when doing this? Are there any cons to this approach?

[dertyfern]

Good practice. We've done it with good success and saw an increase in conversions from non-US Dollar countries.

Be fair on the prices relative to conversion rates as it can upset those customers who may somehow find out if you trying to make more profit from one currency or another.

[piatkow]

Give a clear option to change it as well. Some users may be expats or military personel overseas or connecting through a private network to a hub in a different country.

[sleepy_eye]

Just make sure your webhost/server can handle all those extra resource requests before implementing it.

[olly]

Thanks for the input everyone.

sleepy_eye I too have established what you mentioned as a potential problem. Specifically, we would proceed by doing a country lookup for a given IP only once and then store the result in a cookie - thus each new visitor only triggers this process once. My concern is that search engine spiders would not set up a cookie and incur unnecessary lookups each and every time they request a page. The same would apply for those users who have cookies disabled. The IP, country table would be very large and the database load could be substantial.

Does the above make sense? How does one get around this issue?

The only potential solution I see is to have a table which stores IP addresses and the number of pages they have accessed. One could schedule a process to delete all but the top 50 most active IPs. This table could be used as a precheck to investigating the full IP lookup table, thereby lowering the overhead for repetitive requests from IPs which have not got cookies.

[sleepy_eye]

Using that method you might confuse your repeat/best customers. Somewhere I've seen a service similar to geo targeting but for search engines.
Why not just have the customer choose the currency from a menu on each page then set that into a cookie as they surf other pages.
Heres an idea tho, use the region part of the look up to display products/suggestions people have bought in the past. Just a thought.