[thelist] Multicurrency

[Abhay S. Kushwaha]

Hi John:

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 10:47:46 -0500 (EST), john at johnallsopp.co.uk
wrote:

> Secondly, any thoughts on the design would be appreciated at this
> stage. The site is built on dollars .. each item has a dollar price,
> and the billing is in dollars. So if I take UK clients, convert to
> pounds, display pounds throughout, then they're going to be pretty
> upset that we charge dollars to their credit card and the credit
> card applies their (different) conversion rate, so the price turns
<snip />

It is rarely that people crib about the conversion rates -- but yes, a
single bad incident could domino into an issue. One of my friend's
clients handled the issue by specifying individual price of each
product in the three currencies he planned on accepting (UKP, USD and
Euros) in the back-end database. The application merely displayed the
price in the chosen currency. The difference in prices was apparent -
but he assumed that UK residents will pay in UKP, Europeans will pay
in Euros and the rest in USD and verified so through the shipping
address. Returning users were shown prices based on their locales.
This approach also helped him in calculating the shipping costs
dynamically without having the user specify so. Bad approach maybe, but an approach nevertheless.

HTH,
[a]