Borderless eCommerce is connecting sellers and shoppers in ways that sustain engagement and foster brand loyalty. As the borders come down, paywalls are being simplified to help shoppers feel at home when transacting with sellers overseas.
Several homegrown brands like Snitch brand themselves as “Made in India, for the World”, underlining the importance of global readiness in every aspect of supply chain operations- from accepting orders to payment collection and timely deliveries. What helps financial transparency transcend borders is multicurrency handling, a feature sitting inside eCommerce automation to capture price points and reflect them in the currency of your choice and convenience.
It automatically calculates and converts prices to the c takes away the headache of applying currency conversion across marketplace and shipping fees and taxes, making transactions easy to trace and understand for buyers and sellers alike.
In this post, we’ll explain what multicurrency handling is and where to find this feature within an automated eCommerce system like Base.
How Base Facilitates Multicurrency Pricing
The Base system is designed to accommodate a plethora of settings that run on preconfigured Automatic Actions. Operating under the logic of “done once, for longlasting impact”, the multicurrency feature can be found under price groups, which lets you create several such groups according to the currencies your business accepts. You can categorize price groups and assign them to specific channels by the number of currencies per channel.
You can do this by
- Going to Settings under the products tab in Base.
- Navigate to price groups and click on the option to “Add Price group”.
- A window subsequently opens up, which lets you provide descriptions in a paragraph, set currency and the inventory to which it applies. Additionally, users can determine bundle prices either individually, or automatically calculate it by the individual components within that price group.
- After creating a price group, you can set up currency conversion by ticking the option of making the group dependent on another group. This opens up the price multiplier which can be based on the original price group that it links to.
How Base can Help
Base can help you sell globally by allowing you to create multiple price groups per currency, accelerating international sales. It captures and converts prices to the local currency and generates templates to the format that you’re comfortable with to facilitate a smooth process.
You can explore price group creation with a 30-day free look through of Base in its entirety.
How does Multi-Currency Ecommerce help?
Shopify reports that 92% of online buyers prefer to transact with websites that price in their local currency, which means that enabling multicurrency handling can up the percentage of leads to confirmed shoppers. It lets them see how much an item would cost in the currency of their homeland, and determine if they are being charged fairly. This translates to
Increased trust
Seeing prices in home currency eliminates surprises at checkout and helps the buyer feel at home. What’s more, they don’t have to do the conversion math and pay extra for conversion fees,which could have otherwise driven up the total and final cost of the order, deterring them from shopping.
Marketplace adaptability
Multi-currency handling captures conditions across different markets based on disposable income and local economy. This puts price-sensitive markets at par with affluent markets without compromising product quality. The seller can maximize their profit while remaining market-inclusive.
Pricing Transparency
Prices that reflect consistently and accommodate various currencies reduces cart abandonment, because customers can verify that the price range specific to the product category and budget is fair. Besides currency, you can also integrate multiple paywall options that are favored in a particular region, such as BHIM UPI for Indian customers or Payoneer.
Subscriber growth
To grow globally, sellers must be able to sell locally. And this logic extends to subscription-based models where you can offer customers currency of their choice for recurring services. This can drive retention and increase your monthly revenue rate (MRR), reducing churn.
More pricing control
You can adjust price points against cheaper material procurement, lower shipping rates or production costs. All these affect the final price of the product, leading it to be cheaper despite the exchange rate being higher. In other words, adapt to the local marketplace!
Multicurrency handling drawbacks
Crossing borders requires sellers to fulfill legal and financial obligations for an undisrupted experience. These are some setbacks to consider beforehand;
Higher maintenance costs
Multicurrency adds a layer of complexity to your tech stack. You need it to adapt to payment gateways for which feasibility checks will need to be done beforehand to look at restrictions and conditions. There are certain paywalls that get blocked also or display only select currencies so the seller could lose a cut of the profit to these.
Currency fluctuations
Currency value can change in real-time due to geopolitical factors or market volatility. This will require you to constantly track currencies and apply price adjustments to accommodate these shifts. For example, if the Indian Rupee weakens against Kuwait Dinar, the product is pricier for Indian customers, and this can lead to a decline in sales.
Complicated Accounting
Accounts are likely to take long to reconcile as all transactions should be converted into a base currency for accounting simplicity. This entails several steps spanning conversion, matching and tax deductions, which is prone to error with high order volume. It will also require the seller to have considerable familiarity with currencies beyond the USD or Euro.
