Ongoing technological growth is opening new doors for the e-commerce industry. Digital payments, artificial intelligence, machine learning, multi-currency cards and real-time cross-border payments were some of the dominant card and payment trends of 2020. The popularity of electronic payments is growing every year, and multi-currency e-commerce merchants have been encountering multiple payment challenges. If you are planning to expand your business into the international market, it is important to know why multi-currency is useful and how to choose a multi-currency payment gateway that suits you the best.
How Do Multi-Currency Payments Work?
Multi-currency payment processing allows users to pay in their local currency, for example, EUR for Europe, USD for the USA and GBP for the UK. Let’s give a bit of color to the multi-currency transaction process. There are several steps involved:- For instance, a customer from the US visits a UK merchant’s website and selects the US Dollar from a list of currency options.
- Pricing on the website then changes from GBP to USD.
- The customer completes their purchases on the website by paying in USD.
- The UK merchant receives the payment in GBP.
Why Should Online Merchants Offer Multiple Currencies?
Accepting multiple currencies is not only beneficial for businesses, but will also improve the customer experience. Here are some of the key advantages: Fewer chargebacks resulting from cross-currency pricing disputes. Making purchases in the currency based on a customer’s location eliminates missing currency differences and subsequent chargeback applications. Importance of multilingual checkout design. Customers appreciate it when the checkout language and currency are adapted to their location. This reduces the possibility of cart abandonment and saves customers time and effort. Multi-currency payments can drive more sales, make your business more competitive and attract opportunities for international partnerships. In other words, by accepting payments in multiple currencies, your business will be more visible abroad. However, you should always make sure that you study your new competitors and potential market security issues first.Setting Up Multi-Currency Processing
We will now consider the most crucial criteria that will help you choose a multi-currency payment processor and set everything up according to the needs of your business.- What are your required processing currencies? Make sure that the payment processor accepts these currencies and offers local support services.
- What are your settlement currency preferences? Ask about settlement currencies to make sure monies arrive in your merchant bank account in the desired currency.
- Where are your customers located? First of all, make sure that the payment checkout is automatically displayed in the requisite language so that your customers do not have to translate and figure out the exchange rates themselves. Secondly, do some research on the most popular payment methods in a country in question and confirm that they are included in your payment provider’s list of supported countries.
