Dealing with American Express

They appear to be in the dark ages.

[lgn1]

Being from Canada, we need both Canadian Dollar Merchant Acoounts and US Dollar Merchant Accounts.

This service was offered 4 or 5 years ago in Canada, for US Dollar merchant accounts, and allow us to charge our American Customers the exact amount due, rather than an approximation based on exchange rates.

American Express has always been the holdout. Three years ago, they told me that American Dollar American Express Accounts were only availble to Americans, and that I could only get a Canadian Dollar American Express Account. They also told me that this would soon be changing, due to the need for this service, due to ecom.

So I phone them up the other day, and guess what, I still can't get an American Dollar Merchant Account in Canada.

I find this hard to believe. Is the American Express sales agent out to lunch, or is American Express still sted fastly stuck in the dark ages, when it comes to ecommerce?

[iamlost]

American Express is simply being helpful :-)

You charge your AE customers in your local currency and AE takes care of all conversions from their currency to yours.

This operation is fairly opaque with the conversion factor only visible to the customer. As currency conversion is a profit centre I don't expect a change any time soon.

[lgn1]

We don't want to give the American Customer, the impression that we are not an American Site, so we want to stay way from currency conversion, and charge the customer in American Dollars.

We may just vote with our feet and drop American Express. Besides everybody that has an American Express ussually has a VISA or MasterCard anyways.

[fiu88]

Same problem...it may be time to set up an llc, a us address, and sign up with a us based merchant provider...