Multi currency payments

[pixelhaus]

It would make life a lot easier if you could build a currency selector
into Actinic sites so that instead of just showing a secondary currency, it would pass over those values as the primary method of payment. At the point of purchase you would choose which currency to pay in.

[NVL]

You can do that with Norman's tools, and a multi-currency merchant account...

[NormanRouxel]

My NorPrice and my post regarding automatically setting second currency rate both product informative only alternate currency displays.

They don't allow you to use the alternate rate / currency for the PSP.

This can probably be done but it's not an area that I dare to tinker with.

[NVL]

Norman, a man of your genius...

Could you create a plug-in which would allow us to dictate a fixed alternate currency, create an order form for each currency as a group, pass that to the PSP with the currency code field hidden and only allow the order to be completed when both (multiple) PSP approval codes have been returned for each sub-transaction? This being against each product and price break where it would assemble the consolidated order in various currencies...

Hmmm, actually even thinking about that as I type it this sounds problematic.

[NormanRouxel]

As I said "it's not an area that I dare to tinker with".

[Truska]

Am I right to assume Actinic has not progressed any further with the ability to carry out transactions in a selected additional currency, assuming your PSP can support it of course?

I have a client, and I cannot argue with him on this as yet, who is convinced this is putting purchasers off, particular from the USA - we run the site in Euros at the moment and show the US$ as the 2nd price.

Does anyone have an thoughts or know of any surveys etc that relate to this, and buyers actions, when faced with an approximate price, which in the end is what Actinic does at the moment.

[NVL]

What we eventaully did (after dying of boredom waiting) was to install multiple sites mirrored from each other, you can use a database to drive the content, where essentially you have the same site graphically but each is set to have unique currency and perhaps shipping values eg.

www.yourdomain.com < main currency
us.yourdomain.com < us dollar
gb.yourdomain.com < sterling

By using a Geo Redirect (several free options if you search Google) page you can send clients to the correct site when they go to the shop, we placed an element on the redirect informing clients that if the page didn't redirect to select the site manually from a list and second page for failed redirects informing them of the same. It's based on IP, 99% accurate on fixed connections to the web as well as mobile with exception of sat phones.

Norman Rouxell has a currency convertor to display approximate prices but we found most customers then didn't complete payment when the home currency was shown on the payment page, regardless.

[Truska]

Thanks for your thoughts NVL

Having multiple sites? Did that not cause any Google issues with duplicate sites, normally a no no in SEO terms.

We are considering this option as a solution, as the client has the multi site licensee it will not cost anything re s/w, just time and hosting. Oh! and the associated maintenance time/cost to make every change 2 or 3 times.

Do you think the ability to control, based on shopper selection, what currency will be used for the actual transaction will be in V12 - heres hoping..... but that will be 14/18 months away anyway...

[NVL]

From personal experiences I would not hold my breath for Actinic updates in any new version, if it were not for the hassles and monies spent upon plug-ins to get features which should already be there we'd be long gone by now...

However, if you alter the tags / wordy content etc the SEO and difference of pricing should avoid any issues. Set your robots.txt accordingly so they are seen as different sites for each sub-domain. The additional admin, no way around it other than perhaps using a spreadsheet unfortunately.

[4children2enjoy]

Multi currency without fully mirrored sites?

We have been running fully mirrored sites for a year or so to sell to the UK in Pounds, mainland Europe in Euros, USA/Canada in US Dollars, and the Rest of world in Pounds. This works fine - see www.knexusergroup.org.uk
However, we are now trying to achieve this in a more elegant way, by having the product listings on a single site only, and each mirror site only containing its own shopping cart and checkout.
It seems simple to modify the code for the "Add to cart" button on the product listing page so that it adds the product selected to whichever cart we want (UK, Europe, USA, Rest of world).
However, we also want the customer to select their location when they first enter the site, using a drop down menu with the four choices, so that we can then display the correct price and Add to cart button to them. Their location would also be remembered for subsequent visits to the site.
Can anyone advise how this can best be achieved (eg via the cookie)?
Many thanks.

[4children2enjoy]

Multi currency now in a single site

Think I have answered my own question. www.knexusergroup.org.uk is now live with multi currency operating in a single website. Seems to be working fine. This has been achieved using Javascript, via a combination of a "?Region=" parameter and a cookie. I have kept the old sites as fallbacks for any users with Javascript turned off.

Any suggestions for improvements would be welcome.

[DeDanan]

Great solution to multi currency

Hi Andy,

Just had a look at your website and your take and modification on multiple currencies seems to be a very good solution.

Can you elaborate on how you achieved this? I would be very happy to get to the stage that the customer could choose the region/ currency like you have on the home page.

Regards
Jim

[4children2enjoy]

Multi currency in a single site

This is the process required to create a single website which operates in three currencies, as follows:

1. Create a simple external database to hold the product data, including product reference, product name, description, etc, plus the product price in GBP, EUR and USD. We do this in Microsoft Access.

2. Create three Actinic websites, one for each currency. These should be set up under the same URL, with each Actinic website uploaded to a separate folder in that URL (eg shopuk, shopeu and shopus) and each having a different cgi-bin folder (eg cgi-bin-uk, cgi-bin-eu, cgi-bin-us).

3. Link each of these websites to the product database, mapping the correct price in each case (eg link the Euro price in the database to the Actinic variable Price in the EUR website).

4. Now create a fourth Actinic website in its own folder (eg main) and cgi-bin-folder (eg cgi-bin-mn). This will become the website that customers visit.

5. Create new Actinic variables in this Main website for the product price in GBP, EUR and USD, and then link all of these to the product database.

6. Create a Javascript variable called “Region”, which will have three possible values – “eu”, “uk” or “us”.

7. Change the Price display in your Actinic layout to display the price relevant to the Region variable setting (eg display Euro price if Region = “eu”).

8. Use the Region variable setting to display a flag or similar on each page (union jack, EU flag, USA flag), so that users can easily see which shop they are using.

9. Create a Javascript function that will operate as soon as any page is visited, which:

a. Checks to see whether the URL used to visit the page has a parameter set, in the format ?region=xx. Eg http://www.knexusergroup.org.uk/acat...html?region=eu If so, set the Region variable to the value of this parameter (eu, uk or us), and also record this value in a region cookie.

b. If the URL has been called without a region parameter set, set the Region variable set to the value of the region cookie as it was set in the last visit (if any). This ensures the correct prices are displayed on re-visit, and after using Actinic Perl functions such as Search. If no cookie has yet been created, default to “uk”.

10. Change the <Form> statement in your Actinic layout so that when “Add to cart” is selected for a product, it adds that product to cart in the relevant cgi-bin folder (eg if Region=”eu”, <form> should specify the cgi-bin-eu folder.

11. Change the folder for the “Show cart” and “Checkout” buttons so that they go to the relevant cgi-bin folder.

12. Create a mechanism that allows a user to switch from one shop to another. This is achieved simply by adding the relevant ?region= parameter to the URL in the link. We do this in two ways:

a. An option on each page to switch to view the same page in a different currency. (eg to switch to same page in Euros use <thispage>?region=eu)

b. An option in the left navigation bar (and top level section list) to view a different shop. (eg to visit the Euros shop use <shoptoppage>?region=eu)

13. Change the Actinic Javascript which displays cart contents so that it does not display anything if the user changes the region (otherwise it will show data from the wrong cart).

14. Add a test on entry to each page to detect whether the user has Javascript enabled. If they don’t, redirect them to use the relevant local currency website set up in 2 above. This is the only time these websites will be used. All Javascript-enabled users (98% apparently) will use the main website.

15. Set up a scheduled task to download orders regularly from all three cgi-bin folders (uk, eu and us), using the /d switch on the Actinic command line.

16. Upload a robots.txt file for the URL that hides all folders except the main folder.

17. Upload a sitemap that includes only the pages in the main folder.

18. Publish all websites and test.

19. Change all Google adword and Googlebase URL links to include the relevant ?region= settings (eg ?region=eu for French adwords and French Googlebase)

Hope this helps to explain the process. Our website is actually a bit more complicated than this, for instance because:

1. We use breakpoint pricing on some products.

2. We have added “?region=” to all internal links. This allows users to view the site (although not Add to cart) if they have cookies disabled.

3. We also add the /x switch to the command lines for the download task, to export any new orders in the three currencies. We then merge them into a single Access orderbook, which includes a currency variable for each order.

4. For historical reasons, we still use the old Actinic folder name acatalog for our main website.

5. We use Javascript to “grey-out” products that are not available in any region.

6. The various websites are not identical, so we have to set the SectionID as well as the folder name when we Add to cart.

7. We are starting to use a ?lang= parameter as well, to display website content in different languages.

[DeDanan]

Hi Andy, WOW!

Thank you for a very comprehensive how to multi-currency.

I am afraid this type of modification is above my skill level. But if it was easy everyone would have done it and Actinic would have added it in one of the version upgrades.

If you or someone is interested in doing this modification for me then please contact me with an indication of the cost.

Thanks again for the work you put into the reply to my question.
Best regards
Jim

[4children2enjoy]

We are not currently in a position to undertake work for anyone else. Many apologies.

However, I am a bit puzzled as to why Actinic themselves did not build multi-currency in as standard feature a number of years ago. I believe it would be quite easy for them to do this within a single website, rather than using multiple websites, as we have done.