Sample Implementation

There are multiple ways to implement multi-currency shopping effectively in a web site. Each online retailing site is unique and the requirements will vary depending on whether you sell goods or services, the price of your products and other factors. The level of sophistication you want to provide your clients may vary as well.

Some of the key functionality you should consider providing are:

• Pricing of your services in the client's local currency.
• Shopping in the client's local currency.
• Transacting in the client's local currency.

The ability to transact in the local currency will depend on the capabilities of your online credit card transaction provider.

To give you an idea of what is possible, let's take a look at a sample implementation.

TeeTimesWorld

TeeTimesWorld is online service allowing clients to easily book tee times in golf courses worldwide. Because TeeTimesWorld caters to a travelling community of international clients, providing local currency capabilities on its web site was critical to its business.

TeeTimesWorld implement the functionality in a very simple and elegant fashion. First, on its home page, it provides visitors with the ability to pick a local currency. This can be done by providing a simple drop down box with a list of currencies you want to support.

Then, TeeTimesWorld uses the local currency information to translate the local prices (would have been US dollars for this golf course), into the local currency (here we picked Euros). TeeTimesWorld pulls the exchange rate in real-time and converts the pricing information using that exchange rate to as shown here (You can see the prices are displayed in Euros).

It's that simple. You too can make your online retail site more appealing to international buyers. The last thing you want is for the propsective client to have to navigate to a different web page to pull exchange rate information. And they won't have to calculate the price in their local currency in their head.