An Easy Way To Implement Multi-currencies

By Author: Chris Lim
Total Articles: 4
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Have you ever imagine supporting multi-currencies for your online business? Well, it will depend on the nature of your business and how you would like to serve your customer. There is no definite answer that the multi-currencies feature can make your online business a big success or an organic growth. However, at least this feature will make your online business more presented because they may see you as a global player.

You may ask - do I need to be technical savvy to implement this solution? Technically speaking, yes. You must at least possess some basic knowledge of programming languages for the implementation. The solution is not the HTML code insertion, java scripting, CSS markup but some levels of programming and code modifications are needed. Besides the coding stuff, there are some questions you need to answer before the code development.

• Where can I get the latest currency exchange rate?
• How often shall I update my currency exchange rate?
• Is the update a manual process?
• How can I determine where the visitor originated from?
• And, so on.

There is no short ...
... and easy answer to the above questions. Obviously, you will need a 3rd party solution to get your multi-currencies up and running, just a matter between a free or paid solution. This will depend on you budget and the quality of service offering to your visitor. Inevitably, the trade-off of “Quality Assurance” and “Reliability” was the main differences between this two.

For either free or paid solutions, there are 2 major requirements for the multi-currencies implementation, namely IP-to-Country and Currency-Pair-Exchange-Rate. Why? Let’ see the following scenario. When visitors browsing your web site, you may want to display them the prices using their localized currency. In order to produce this result, we need to know where these visitors came from – by inspecting their IP address. The IP address can tell you quite some information, but in this case we only require the geo location information. But, wait! How can I know the geo location by looking this 4 octets number, 123.123.123.123? There is no way you can get anything directly from the numbers. You need an external database - a database providing you the mapping from the IP address to country. There are lots of free and paid versions available for your choice, and here I will recommend ipinfodb.com (free version) and http://www.ip2location.com (paid version).

What’s next after I manage to translate the IP into country? You need to be knowledgeable enough knowing the commonly used currency in their country. For example, Switzerland uses Swiss France (CHF) instead of Euro (EUR). Once you have this information, you will probably need another 3rd party service to get the latest currency exchange rate. You may opt for a real time currency exchange rate, but an end-of-day rate shall be good for e-commerce solution. Again, you have the choices of using the free and paid version. Research is not ended yet, you also need to aware of the currency symbol to be used in displaying the result to your visitors.

Hmm, you may ask again, am I going to do all these for the multi-currencies feature? No, there is an easy way. What if I’m going to tell you that you only need the visitor’s IP address and voila, you get the currency information in return. And, you do not need to worry about the IP-to-Country, commonly used currency, symbol and anything else. It will be nicely and magically carried out by a 3rd party solution and return you the wanted result. This innovative solution was created by FraudLabs.com (http://www.fraudlabs.com) called IP2Currency Exchange Web Service. It was a Web Service and therefore you do not need to set up the database to capture the relevant information, such as, the IP-to-Country mapping table. You just need to supply the visitor’s IP address, and the rest will be nicely carried out behind the scene. In return, the web service will return the latest currency exchange rate and the relevant information. However, this is a paid service. Let’s put it this way, if you consider the efforts to implement yourself from ground up and worrying about the exchange rate accuracy or reliability, it definitely worth your money. Furthermore, time is precious. Sometimes it’s good to get a solution out there in the market rather than re-invent the wheel. At least you can better concentrate on your business strategy to get more customers.