Paypal Website Payments Pro and Multiple Currencies?

Can aUS merchant accept CDN through paypal's website payments pro...

[celerityfm]

I've got a shopping cart that's integrated with Paypal's website payments pro and I'm wondering if I can accept credit card payments in Canadian dollars or not.

Right now it takes US dollars just fine, but I don't have a CDN credit card to test this with ;)

Does anyone have any experience with this or can confirm if this is possible? Paypal's website and Google have produced nothing helpful to confirm or deny this capability.

Cheers

[celerityfm]

For the record, yes, you can accept Canadian dollars through credit card transactions through paypal's website payments pro.

I tried calling them and the first time I asked if I could take "international currencies" ... they put me on hold for a while and when they came back they said it wasn't possible.

Thinking that I might have got the wrong person or just asked the wrong question I called and asked again but with specifics, basically asked "can I accept canadian credit cards" and they said yes.

So there you have it. Case closed.

[jwolthuis]

The only currency accepted via the Direct Payment API is USD. This is the API used for credit cards.

The Express Checkout API accepts currencies in AUD, USD, CAD, EUR, GBP, and JPY. This API is the more traditional "transfer to PayPal to complete this purchase" payment method.

[celerityfm]

Ok so your saying that if you are using paypals website payments pro to accept credit cards that you won't be able to accept payments unless they are in USD?

[jwolthuis]

Correct. You can Google "integration guide only currency" for the PayPal documentation.

Any other currency returns Error 10526, "Unsupported Currency".

[celerityfm]

Wow, spot on.

Thank you sir for clearing that up. I guess I shouldn't have trusted the paypal website payments pro support when they contradicted each other.

The documentation you told me to Google up also confirms what you said, right on the top of page 15, first page of Chapter one :).

I am supposing however that if a credit card were to automatically convert it's native currency to USD at the time of transaction that things would work, assuming that the credit card being used has that feature.

In any case this is important to consider if you are a merchant who wants to do international business using website payments pro as a payment gateway.

Thanks for your help here!

[jwolthuis]

The credit card would need to be tendered in USD. The issuing bank will gladly convert that to the card-holders currency at the wholesale conversion rate, then tack-on a "currency exchange fee" of a couple percent or more. (It's a CPU-intensive calculation :-).

[celerityfm]

Hehe I've seen that fee before when purchasing things online from overseas. Again, good to know sir, I appreciate your assistance on this. Very informative!

Cheers