Five mistakes teams make with multi-currency selling

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit multi-currency selling.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Warning signs

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Showing local prices lifts conversion in export markets
• Rounding to sensible local prices matters more than exact conversion
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Be explicit about which currency is charged. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

A reasonable first step

In practice

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.