When looking to explore the international market, there are a number of challenges a business has to overcome. You have to realign some aspects of your services to ensure you do not clash with foreign laws, regulations, and ethical standards. You may need to find new shipping partners and even translate your ecommerce site to other languages. There may also be need to expand your support team and hire multilingual personnel, which will likely translate to changes in the payroll.
While many online businesses may be open to making such changes, the need to accept more than one currency is almost always forgotten. BigCommerce is one of the leading open SaaS ecommerce platforms, and, recently, they made it possible for merchants to provide services to international customers in their local currencies. This has been shown to come with a number of benefits, and one of them is saving customers the hassle of calculating item prices themselves. This article will give you insights into multi-currency features and how adopting them can help boost sales and improve customer experience on your site.
Why You Should Make Use of Multi-Currency Features
Canesta has been partners with BigCommerce for many successful years, and despite the platform being extremely comprehensive and flexible, we have had our fair share of problems dealing with international clients. There was always the need to price our products in Euros and Pounds as well, given a significant share of our customer-base is European.
Just like Canesta, most US-based online service providers can attribute a part of their cash inflow to cross-border businesses. However, many have struggled to make headway in the international market due to lack of a prodder multi-currency strategy. Customers have to incur unnecessary costs on their end as they are charged conversion fees by credit card companies – something that may prompt them to forfeit potentially superior services for second-rate local options.
Implementing a multi-currency payment strategy will be beneficial both to your customers and your business.
Here’s how:
1. It does away with foreign transaction fees
As stated above, conversion fees are among the top reasons most single-currency ecommerce stores do not make it in foreign countries. No one wants to pay extra money for a service that has alternatives just because they live overseas. By accepting local currencies, you are doing away with these transaction fees, and patching an opening through which prospects are falling out of your sales pipeline.
2. It evokes loyalty
Loyalty is earned, and showing your customers that you care about them is one of the easiest routes into their hearts. If you run an established ecommerce website, new customers from foreign countries may find it fascinating that you have actually listed products in their currency. It sends a message that they are important to you even though they don’t contribute much to your revenue from sales. Using the new BigCommerce multi-currency payment features, you can make this possible without paying an extra coin. More than 100 different currencies have been included, and you are free to choose the one you want depending on who your current customers are and the markets you are targeting.
3. It reduces chargebacks
Sometimes customers buy without understanding the charges that come with purchasing from a foreign enterprise, which may cause them to regret the transaction and potentially dispute the charge later. Besides being costly to you, this will ruin the good name of your business and potentially cause your payments provider to question the legitimacy of the service you offer.
By charging for products and services in many different currencies, customers will fully understand how much the transaction will cost them. This will help them make purchases they will be satisfied with, at least from a cost standpoint.
4. It gives you the edge on your rivals
The simple fact that local businesses in foreign countries offer services in local currencies makes them more desirable regardless of the quality of services they provide. You can use this to your advantage against other foreign service providers. As pointed out above, introducing a multi-currency payment strategy elicits loyalty from customers. This makes you their first priority whenever they want to purchase a product. It also gives you immunity against new marketing gimmicks from your competitors.
5. It reduces cart abandonment
As a buyer, it is plausible that the more you add items into your cart, the more you become conscious about how much they will cost. Now imagine buying from an online store that only sells in a foreign currency. It can be a nightmare following your budget and marking expenditure limits.
Introducing the option to choose a currency can incredibly increase sales on your store as it lets shoppers gauge their spending using a measure of the value they are familiar with.
How ecommerce websites can get the most out of multi-currency features
There are a number of ways in which online stores can use the multi-currency system to increase business. These tips will help you put the feature to good use:
1. Analyze your audience before deciding prices
It is possible that the first thing you would do with the multicurrency feature is pick a few of the more popular currencies, e.g. the Euro, the Pound and the Dollar. This is okay if you are selling a product or service that is only consumed in the countries in which those currencies are used. However, to increase effectiveness, check your analytics to have a nodding acquaintance with how your customer base is distributed. If you have a decent number of customers and a country or region makes up more than 5 percent of your customer-base, then you should consider supporting their currency.
As regards price setting, you can do it manually or set it to automatic. Manual pricing is when you price products for different currencies after analyzing all significant factors. Automatic pricing, on the other hand, involves letting the system self-update in response to exchange rate changes throughout the day. It is a great option for merchants with many different products and a geographically spread-out customer base. Sellers with fewer products can go with the more accurate manual pricing mode. Manual pricing gives you total control over price determination. It might be time consuming but data collected this way is more accurate and helps minimize overcharging and underpricing, particularly in products with relatively stable prices.
2. Find a way to display your multi-currency options
So, how should you display your options? Should you create separate websites for different currencies and audiences or just put a random currency on default and give users the option to change it? The availability of other pages with information targeting specific audiences might necessitate creating separate websites. However, if it is just the price tags that you need adapted, consider creating dropdown menus and placing them at the top of the sales page or next to each item on display. Whatever you choose, be sure to make the currency change button obvious and perceptible.
Conclusion
The recent BigCommerce change is going to be of great significance to ecommerce websites created on the platform. Owners can sell to specific audiences without burdening users with the trouble of doing the conversion calculations themselves. The above tips can help you get started with the multi-currency feature and simplify the purchase process on your website for a better user experience.
