Ip Geolocation And Multiple Currencies

By Author: Chris Lim
Total Articles: 4
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Localization has gained traction in today's e-commerce solutions, regardless if you are selling physical goods, providing online services, blogging and so on; in whatever businesses or non-commercial services, you are somehow need the solution. In my opinion, I believe these are a few solutions you should pay attention to: Google Analytics, IP Geolocation and Multiple Currencies.

Google Analytics, a popular tool and perhaps, you have been using this amazing yet free tool to track and analyze the visitors coming from various part of the world. Why would you need this? The answer is pretty obvious. You want know better about your customers, i.e, which country are they from, from where they visited your site, which page they are interested in; so that you can plan out an effective marketing strategy to get hold on them and get most of their money out from their pocket. After all, it's business!

Google Analytics is good and a must tool, to my opinion, but it may not fit everyone in every aspects. Custom requirements, i.e country-restriction-implementation, page redirection, custom visitor statistics, and fraud prevention, ...
... will require you to get your own implementation of IP Geolocation to fulfill your needs. It is because you, indeed, need to know the visitor information at once during the important trigger points, to react them with the right response. This is nothing can be achieved via an analytics tool; therefore, you need an IP Geolocation solution - to put it simple, a way to get the geo location from the visitor's IP address. A 3rd party service, such as IP2Location, shall be able to work you the solution.

Assuming that you have the IP Geolocation solution implemented, you may also want to display your beloved visitors with their homeland currency. Someone may find it an option, but I believe this constitutes one of the factors to the success of a web business. Before any magic happens, you have to know where to source the exchange rates information. Again, you need another 3rd party solution provider. To summarize, you need an IP Geolocation solution to get the country information of a visitor, and Exchange Rates solution to produce the up-to-date exchange rate. However, the good news is there is a combined-solution out in the market, IP2Currency, which enabling you can get both the geo location information and homeland exchange rates in an integration solution.

The IP2Currency service is a recent released service to the market, backed by a leading geolocation solution provider - IP2Location. It comes in the form of webservice, and it requires some basic scripting knowledge to manipulate the calls and results. It fairly easy to understand it; furthermore, various sample codes are provided on the website. The results returned by the service also pretty comprehensive, such as:
- From Currency Code (ISO 4217)
- To Currency Code (ISO 4217)
- To Currency Symbol
- From Amount
- To Amount (Converted Amount)
- Conversion Rate
- To Country Name
- To Country Code (2-chars country code of the converted value)

There is no rocket science behind this technology, but a combined solution of both technologies into one integrated solution to ease the multiple currency implementation process. You may still achieve the same result by combining the results separately from different suppliers with different retrievals, but I don't think this make the logical sense if your main aim is just the multiple-currency solution.