Estimated read time: 3 minutes, 52 seconds

The world is getting smaller as more people shop online, and it’s far more likely that customers from around the world are visiting your site with the intention to buy.

If you want to maximize international sales, it’s in your interest as an online vendor of digital products or recurring subscription services to provide a shopper-friendly, localized user experience on all your checkout pages. Customers are more likely to complete a sale if they are presented with their preferred currency, payment method, and language. So in order to close more sales, it’s important to partner with an ecommerce solution that can offer this complete package.

Before you make a decision about your ecommerce solution, it’s important that you confirm that it can support your business should it go global. A solid ecommerce platform will offer multi-currency support that provides many benefits to vendors and end-customers.

How can this option benefit your business in the long run? Read on to learn how multi-currency options can improve your bottom line.

What’s Multi-Currency Support?

Multi-currency support means that shoppers can pay for your products or services using the currency they are already comfortable using. Typically, shoppers in other nations are forced to pay entirely in USD or Euros instead of the currency of their country of residence. This experience can be jarring for many online shoppers and may even discourage them from completing their transaction.

Luckily, there are ecommerce solutions working to eliminate this experience and protect your bottom line by offering shoppers an array of payment options to choose from. FastSpring, for example, enables shoppers to pay in a variety of currencies, including USD, Australian Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Swiss Franc, Danish Krone, Euro, Great British Pound, Hong Kong Dollar, Japanese Yen, New Zealand Dollar, Swedish Krona, and Singapore Dollar.

According to Forrester Research, 25% of European and 30% of US online consumers buy goods cross-border. Presumably, when it comes to software, the percentage is even higher than the overall ecommerce average cited by Forrester. As interest in cross-border shopping grows, supporting multi-currency payments will be critical in facilitating global sales.

What are other advantages to using multi-currency?

Avoid Extra Charges, Ensure Customer Loyalty
Using multi-currency helps the customer avoid being charged extra fees for currency conversion on their credit card statements. When customers see these extra charges, they are far less likely to want to purchase from your site again in the future. Instead, it’s more probable that they’ll request a refund or issue a chargeback due to dissatisfaction with the higher price and general annoyance with the added fees. Being transparent about your pricing is the first step towards fostering repeat sales of your digital product or service. For software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, having a loyal customer base is critical in helping to ensure the success of your business.

Pricing Display Consistency
Pricing display consistency is important in winning a customer’s trust. Multi-currency ensures that customers see your product’s pricing displayed in a simple, rounded number to which they’re accustomed. Say, for example, 20.00 Euros instead of 19.53 Euros.

Pay Via Bank Transfer
Multi-currency support goes beyond just offering customers the ability to pay with a variety of accepted currencies! Capture more sales and grow your revenue by allowing customers to also pay with alternative payment options. For example, many European customers prefer real-time bank transfers using their online bank accounts.

Easy Setup In FastSpring’s Platform
If you’re concerned that offering multi-currency pricing might complicate your online store or require you to do more work, think again. FastSpring’s platform makes it easy to set up multi-currency pricing by allowing you to individually select each currency you want added to your product’s pricing options.

Reduce Cart Abandonment, Refunds, Chargebacks
Multi-currency reduces shopping cart abandonment and can minimize refund and chargeback rates. For any currencies you do not specify localized pricing for, the prices will be displayed to customers using real-time foreign exchange rates. Customers will appreciate your straightforward approach to pricing as well as the lack of effort required to see the price in the currency of their preferred format.

FastSpring Currency Calculator

Currency exchange rates, including those for cross-sells, can also be calculated with +5% or +10% conversions, to account for market fluctuations. This aids you in controlling sales in foreign countries and can be a great help in calculating product discounts, with a safe margin built in.

 

Want to learn how partnering with an all-in-one ecommerce platform can help you unlock greater sales revenue for your business and take your business global? Click here to speak with one of our platform experts!