Multi-currency selling: what to get right first

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you only fix one thing about multi-currency selling this quarter, make it the first item below.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Start here

Showing local prices lifts conversion in export markets. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Then this

Rounding to sensible local prices matters more than exact conversion. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

Eventually

Be explicit about which currency is charged. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

What this looks like day to day

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about multi-currency selling before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Be explicit about which currency is charged — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.