Currency Converter

[Miop]

At the moment, my home made site displays prices in UK pounds.
To get into Froogle, I need prices displayed in US Dollars, so basically I need a script or something that can convert the prices so that Dollars are displayed as well.

Does anyone have any recommended applications for this?

I did a search a while ago when I looked for a basic currency converter to put in the shopping basket (customer chooses applicable currency and converts it using the link), and I'm sure I saw some you could just load on your pages.
I did find one which was $40/month, but this is too expensive for me at this stage.

[sun818]

Do you need real-time conversions, or is an approximate acceptable? For the Froogle feed, I can see you putting an approximate US Dollar amount. Although I remember that Froogle is available only to US merchants.

[Miop]

Just an approximate one will do. There are other UK web sites on Froogle, and I applied, but they said they couldn't accept me unless the prices were displayed in Dollars.

[sun818]

I was thinking you could retrieve an XML feed for the currency conversion. I did a quick search there seem to lots of php/mySQL friendly solutions out there. Maybe run a cron job every hour to update a currency conversion table in mySQL and use that to display your dollars amounts on the web page? If you want to get fancy, add a date stamp with the conversion rate and give Froogle the monthly average of the conversion rate.

[Keilo]

This is what we did

if you can export your product list in to a excel spread sheet then set it up so that Froogle is accepting your feed create a column with a Sum function where you take the average UK price and calculate it in to US save it as a CVS file with no formatting and send it to Froggle.

When you apply you have to say you are a UK based company selling also in US dollar worked for us we are Australian based and we deal with UK currency and US and Japan.

However
We build in to our system a live converter based on Yahoo which is updated every 4 hours and then we export this in to each currency as a Excel sheet.

Would be also good if you do data feeds for your affiliates and some need UK some US etc .

[danieljean]

Rather than a straight conversion, have you considered having a separate price list for each currency you support?

$3.16 or $2.81 is an odd price for a widget, especially when the psychological price is $2.95.

[sun818]

Take the integer of the number then add .99

For example: int(price)+.99

3.16 becomes 3.99
2.81 becomes 2.99