provide prices in local currencies?

does this help sales / conversion.

[marcus76]

Hi,

wondering if anyone provides pricing to customers in local currency. I sell to the UK and Europe but currently only offer payment in Sterling £. I'm applying for a Euro merchant account so my cart can also accept the euros as payment. Was just curious if anyone has gone down this route before and noticed an increase of sales?

Thanks.

[uksports]

Be careful how you implement it - the great british public is really slow on this - we used to display $US alongside our £UK prices as we do a fair bit to the US and we then had a never ending queue of e-mails from brits asking how long delivery from the US would take, despite our UK addess and phone number being prominent!

We solved it by offering seperate carts priced in $US and Euros, but even so alot of non-uk orders are still made in £UK

-- Chris

[marcus76]

thanks for the heads-up Uksports. I'm considering doing the same, having a drop down currency selection box which will convert prices across the store to Euro.

Did you notice any increase in sales traffic? i sell to the UK and Europe - lotta people browse from Europe, only had a handful of sales - wondering if it's related to the currencies.

[epfantasia]

We are based in the UK and noticed an overnight doubling in the percentage of sales coming from the US as soon as we started displaying and settling in dollars.

I also think it helps if your prices are rounded somehow, and not just a direct conversion. We round to the nearest 0.25 as we found showing something like $8.76 was much less effective than, say, $8.75. You will also need to have a record of the exchange rates or prices you used for all currencies too. We revise pricing every Sunday automatically based off the current GBP exchange rates, but some items are kept static to prevent confusion.

[TimmyMagic]

I used to display the $ prices next to the £ prices, but I kept having to update the prices because of the fluctuating dollar. Now I display in £'s but have a currency conversion tool next to each price. I guess there are many out there but I use one by xe.com

Tim

[MetaFunk]

Can anyone suggest good ways to automatically update currency prices. $ and EURO initially.

Regards
G,

[epfantasia]

MetaFunk -- if you know any PERL, have a look at the CPAN module archives, and you can find a few ones that will grab conversion rates from which, hopefully, you can then manipulate your prices.

We actually get the exchange rates from our payment processor, which makes them available daily in CSV format. A script that runs as a cron job grabs the rates, updates the prices, and stores them in a database table.

[lgn1]

We profile by IP address against a database, Maxmind, I think, to determine the country the customer is from and then provide the prices in currency, the customer is from. Its about 95% accurate, as proxy servers and aol.whatever will always report USA regardless of origin country.

I do get better conversion, in about the 10% range.

[MetaFunk]

Thanks epfantasia. I use ASP at the moment on a Windows server. Any ideas for that?

Thanks
G,

[MetaFunk]

Any thoughts for ASP?