Multi currency payments

[brucet]

I'm interested to know specifically what you (everybody) mean by multi-currency.

We're considering adding support for a third currency in the same way as the second, which is the most common request. But true multi-currency is a more complicated and open-ended task.

I haven't seen how Norman's plugin handles it. But approaching the concept from scratch, AFAICS it would entail:
1) a mechanism for shoppers to choose their own currency at the web site, and for all prices and currency symbols on the site to switch dynamically to that currency.
2) conversion of the checkout and order processing to operate in any currency.
3) a means of updating exchange rates daily, or perhaps hourly. I think there are about 200 hard currencies worldwide. You would probably only support a subset of those, but updating exchange rates manually would quickly become impractical. There are updating services but they are very costly - the market leader charges about $500 per PC per annum.
4) some customers would undoubtedly want the ability to transact in each currency they offer, which has big implications for our payment gateway integrations.

So there's a lot of work to be done just in scoping the project, and it's potentially quite a large development. It's also not one of the most requested. Those two factors together are the reason why we have not so far undertaken it.

[leehack]

IME, it's as simple as wanting an Irish person to choose euros, pay in euros and be billed in euros, whereas an English person can choose sterling, pay in sterling and be billed in sterling.

If you have a site in Sterling, displaying in Euro as a second currency, 100% of the time the Euro customer will not pay what you have told them. This causes problems and is pants as you can imagine. A third option will not solve this, people need to be able to choose their currency and be billed for the exact amount they are told. Actinic may need to cater for multiple PSPs, one for each currency.

[4children2enjoy]

Bruce - in response to your four-point request for more information:

1. Yes, agree.

2. Yes, agree.

3. Don't think that most customers would shop at a website on which the prices in their local currency changed hourly or even daily. In my experience, if a company really wants to sell in (say) Euros as well as GBP, then it must set an exchange rate that remains the same for a reasonable period. We review our exchange rates monthly, and post currency exchange losses/gains each month to our nominal ledger.

4. Don't understand why the update to the payment gateway needs to be complicated.

Also would observe:

a) The fact that multi-currency is not one of the most requested updates is not really the issue to me. More and more websites offer multi-currency as standard, I think due at least in part to the adverse trading situation in the UK. Actinic needs multi-currency a) to dissuade existing Actinic developers from moving to another web development product and b) to attract new web development customers.

b) Don't agree that multi-currency would need to be a large development project. The approach we adopted (see above) took maybe 10 man days.

Hope this helps.

Andy