A client who is currently selling their product online to the UK market was in the process of launching in the US and needed their ecommerce store built in WooCommerce updated to display prices in GBP & USD. WooCommerce does not support multi-currency as standard and as the client did not want to run two websites and its was too far into the launch process to change the ecommerce platform a solution was needed.
Currency Converter Widgets
These widgets can be added to WooCommerce to enable the visitor to see an approximation of what they will be charged for the item in their base currency. These weren’t suitable for the following reasons:
- For the user experience and to reduce visitor bounce rates it is important to show the visitor the price in their home currency. Currency converter widgets often require the visitor to convert the price by interacting with the site.
- Fixed prices in US$ needed to be displayed, most currency converters do what their name implies, they convert the base currency using an exchange rate which can vary.
- The customer will still be charged in the base currency and their credit card provider will convert this at their exchange rate making the actual price charged different to the one quoted on the site.
- Prices need to be shown including taxes (VAT). These will be different depending on the buyer’s country and is too complicated for standard converter widgets.
Limited Choice
To meet the launch deadline and to avoid the need to write a costly custom solution the search was on to find a solution and surprisingly for WooCommerce the choice is limited.
WooCommerce Multilingual by WPML.org which enables WooCommerce to run in multiple languages and currencies still requires the user to choose the currency which is not what we needed. A decision to update the base function of WooCommerce needs to be taken carefully particularly when this can affect a company’s revenue. After further research and testing a solution which meet the brief was found the Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce.
Currency Switcher for WooCommerce with the Tax Display by Country addon
After testing and correspondence with the developers I was happy that this would be a suitable solutions particularly as it met all of our requirements:
- Fixed currency prices can be set for each product (the plugin can also calculate the currency price based on the current exchange rate).
- Prices can be shown with VAT in the UK and without VAT to US visitors with the Tax Display by Country addon.
- The plugin uses the visitors IP to display the correct currency to the visitor. This was a big factor for me as visitors from the US should be shown the correct price (including taxes) in the correct currency when they land on the site. This will help to reduce bounce rates and shopping cart abandonment.
- Major payment gateways supported. The transaction value needs to be passed in the currency amount with the currency code and this needs to be supported by the credit card processing provider to ensure the customer is charge in US$ and not GBP.
- Plugin Support. This was the a major factor for me and I have say that I was very impressed by the speed and quality of response from support when I raised any questions.
I have no affiliation with aelia and receive no commission for recommending their product. I do think it is important to share solutions from companies which have clearly thought about the functionality required from their offering and also offer very good customer support.