Currency data is a crucial part of any business, but not all stores are equipped to handle it. However, currency conversion is essential if you’re running an e-commerce site. Luckily, we can help ensure that your customers are always presented with the right price based on their location and preferred payment method.
Over 70% of customers say they are more likely to shop at a website that displays prices in their currency.
The currency selector is the best solution for most businesses. It allows you to offer several currencies or just one, and it’s easy to implement. You can also choose how you display the pricing information as a separate tab or in line with your products. There are many ways to begin offering customers the currency selector on your website, but we’ll show you how we did it at Shopify!
If you do not display prices in your visitors’ own currency, they need to convert it manually
- If you do not display prices in your visitors’ currency, they need to convert them manually. This is a time-consuming process that’s easy to make mistakes on, and many people forget to do it.
- Displaying prices in local currencies helps avoid any confusion about currency conversion rates. The visitor sees the price of an item as it appears on their computer screen—without having to think about converting from one currency into another.
Providing a currency selector is the best solution for most businesses
Providing a currency selector is the best solution for most businesses. This allows users to choose their preferred payment method and ensures they are charged in their currency, avoiding confusion or sudden price fluctuations. Providing an easy-to-find tool helps customers feel more comfortable with your site and reduces the risk of them abandoning their cart because of foreign pricing or payment issues.
The most important thing you can do when adding a currency selector is to make sure it’s easy to find on every page of your website—not just product pages but also pages like checkout or account management pages where customers might need it most urgently. It should not be hidden away within dropdown menus or buried behind multiple layers of forms (yes, this happens).
It’s also important that your conversion rates are up-to-date so that customers know exactly how much they will be paying in their local currency during checkout.
You can offer several currencies or just one
You can offer any number of currencies or just one.
Setting up a multi-currency store is easy if you have a global audience and it makes sense for your business to be available in multiple currencies. You can choose from over 250 supported currencies and automatically update exchange rates daily to ensure that customers always see the most accurate rates when they pay with their preferred cash. You can also enable automatic currency conversion, so customers don’t need to do any math (or think about which currency they’re purchasing).
Suppose you only have local customers who live in one country. In that case, setting up a multi-currency store probably isn’t suitable for you—you might not want to deal with the additional complexities of exchanging between multiple currencies. It’s still essential to ensure that your prices are listed in each customer’s native language; otherwise, they may feel confused by random numbers!
You have options for how you display your pricing information
You have several options for displaying your currency data. For example, you can choose between two currency symbols: the dollar sign or a comma. You can also show prices in either of these formats: USD or $890,000.
The number of decimal places to display is another setting you have control over when using API calls to convert currencies on Shopify POS and Shopify Payments.
You can make the right choice for your business with API access to conversion data and solutions that update it in real-time
Currency data is helpful for online stores because you can use it to display prices in your customer’s local currency, make sure your prices are competitive, and check for exchange rate fluctuations.
API access to real-time conversion data and solutions that update it allows you to make the right choice for your business by giving you control over how currency rates affect your bottom line. There are plenty of providers out there that provide appropriate data (e.g. google finance or fxapi.com)
Conclusion
When you’re thinking about handling currency conversion in your online store, it’s important to consider all of these factors. By offering your customers multiple currencies, you can help them shop more easily and feel confident about their purchases. API access to conversion data is crucial if you have a large inventory or sell globally. You need real-time updates that don’t require manual input from your team every time there’s an exchange rate change.
