I am constantly getting emails like this from my customers.
I have conflicting prices on two separate emails regarding confirmation of order. 2checkout.com (order number 393988####) has a final price of $477.16 whereas rhdjapan admin (order number:RHD13349) has a final price of $468.46. I am a little confused of this could you please clarify.
From what i can see the total that the customer was charged is more than my website said it was when he left my website to make payment on 2co website.
It seems that 2co is automatically changing the currency of the user based on ip address then tacking on fees for converting to usd.
There is a trust from the customer that the final price on my website is the final price he will pay. The customer’s IP address changes the currency but the customer still believes that he will be charged the USD rate from my site. He is not aware that 2co is going to make money off him by giving a currency rate that will be more than the price on my site.
This breaks trust between my customer and my company and it leaves me as a customer of 2co unhappy.
I need to be able to specify the currency that the 2co payment page is in. At that time if the customer chooses to change the currency based on where he is that is fine.
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If you’re not sure what currency the customer paid in, you can look up a sale in the 2Checkout system. You will see 3 columns with prices. These columns are Vendor Pricing (which shows the price based on the vendors default currency), US Dollar Price (This is always the USD price), and Purchase Price (The Currency The customer paid in). This will allow you to look up the sale to see what currency the customer paid in and see the USD amount that the sale was placed for. I suspect in the example you provided the buyer paid in a different currency than was reflected in your cart system.
2Checkout will automatically convert the total of a sale to the local currency of the buyer, when the account is set in US Dollar. The currency is always shown to the customer on our purchase pages when they are checking out. The price is listed in a Price column that has the currency symbol and shows the 3 letter abbreviation of the currency they are paying with. The currency is also reflected in the summary box of our purchases pages which is located on the right side of the page. If the customer does not wish to pay in that currency, they can click any of the flags along the top of the page to change the currency.
We perform this automatic currency conversion so the buyer can see the sale total in their local currency. We also do this because many foreign buyers will encounter fees if they place a sale in USD and their credit card is based in their local currency.
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Most customers in 2008 have international credit cards that do not charge fees for international payments. The credit cards (as does mine) also gives the exact market rate for conversion so what 2co is doing is not saving the customers money, it is making them pay more than what my checkout says.
For customers that are checking out with thousands of dollars of merchandise this difference is going in to the hundreds of dollars. I believe you have just been contacted by one of my customers for just this reason.
I do not want to have to go through each customer complaint and refund the difference as this is an error with your service.
2co has a big opportunity here to correct this as each one of my customers that feels ripped off by this practice will not only use 2co from my page but will most likely never use 2co on any webpage again.
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It appears that you allow customers to view prices on your site in currencies other than USD, your account display currency, and are then converting that price to USD when the customer is redirected to 2Checkout. It appears that the conversion rate that you are using on your site is not the same rate that we are using. As our rate is different than the rate you are using you may wish to only list the prices on your site in USD. Customers will still see the billing price converted to their native currency if their IP location is detected, or they may wish to elect another payment currency at checkout if that currency is supported.
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2co has a big opportunity here to correct this as each one of my customers that feels ripped off by this practice will not only *NOT* use 2co from my page but will most likely never use 2co on any webpage again.
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Hello,
I only accept dollars with use with your service because you do not have the functionality as paypal does with multi currencies. No matter what currency they choose or i specify on my website there is a problem with the way you are processing payments.
2co is changing details that are specified in the shopping cart and this is unacceptable. The currency rate 2co is using is making the price higher for my customers.
So by default the detail that 2co is changing in the customers shopping cart is the amount of money that the check out is and this is not acceptable by the customer. The point is that the customer should be able to see the exact details that are in the checkout details in the payment page.
2co should not be changing any details that are specified in the shopping cart page as it is not only confusing to the customer and is making the customer pay more. It looks bad for 2co because you are the ones processing the order. It does not look bad for me because it is occurring on your website not mine. This is going to lower your customer return rate because they will not want to pay more with your service when they can check out with my other payment options (paypal, ect..) and have the currency be the exact same as what it was in the check out details page on my site.
I could put a warning message in my site that is displayed when the customer chooses your payment service explaining what you are doing but this will look bad for your service i think and will perhaps push more customers to use our other payment services.
So I am asking that you do not change the checkout details that are on my site and you put a message in your page that says to the effect of, “To view this total in another currency please click the flag of the currency to the right.”
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@rhdjapan – We are taking a closer look at your website integration with 2Checkout. We will provide a response as soon as we have more information regarding this issue.
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Thank you for that! Please make sure to test with proxy servers from multiple countries to see how the currency is changed and how the difference is from the dollar rate on my site.
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We did some tests on your site and the problem is that you are converting the currency back to USD before submitting it to 2Checkout at a different conversion rate then we have available to us. You are then expecting our conversion rate to match your chosen conversion rate, which is not possible.
We are not changing any of the USD total values that you submit, we are only converting them to the local currency based on the exchange rate we are given. Unfortunately the conversion rate you are using before you send the USD total to us is not the same rate we use. Because of this you are going to see a different converted amount when the USD total is automatically converted to the local currency of the buyer or when a customer clicks a flag to change the currency.
My suggestion is that you provide the pricing on your site in USD and do not convert the price to a different currency. This will allow customers to only see 1 conversion when they get to our site and there will be no discrepancy between the rate we use and the rates you are using to convert to another currency. At this point if the customer is concerned about the conversion they could change the currency back to USD and see a total that matches what they were shown in your websites cart.
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Joel,
Thank you for getting back to me. One thing I think you are missing as 2co is an international credit card vendor.
There is one obvious reason why we done sell our products in dollars.
1. We dont live in the USA we live in Japan. Everything in Japan and the rest of the world is not priced in dollars. The value of the dollar is subprime and getting worse. Asking your vendors to price everything in dollars is not a very good fix for your shopping cart problem. 2co does not allow us to send multiple currencies to our bank accounts so we must choose a currency to receive. We choose dollars as everybody is familiar with that currency.
2. 2co represents 20% of our total sales so it would not make sense to price everything in our website in dollars. When it is a minority payment service. (It is still very important and we thank you very much for it, dont get me wrong here.)
What we are asking is that you do not change the currency in the check out of our shopping cart. Your exchange rates are making our customers pay more than what they are seeing in our shopping cart. It is just as easy to keep the currency the same as specified in the shopping cart.
Suggestions;
1. Those flags dont mean much to me, I had no idea just by looking at the flags that clicking them would allow me to change the currency. Im sure that it is the same with most of my customers. Why dont you put currency symbols there or superimpose currency symbols on the flags so its a little more understood.
2. Just as online banks, paypal and other online banking facilities when you click to change one currency to another you should show the customer the currency rate they are receiving so they can make an informed decision on which currency to use.
Again, if you do not arbitrarily change the currency in the first place then the customer will proceed to check out with dollars. And if they click a different currency and you charge them more it will because they changed the currency and not you.
This way you will not have my customers calling you and complaining that you gave them a poor currency conversion and they paid more than what is on my check out.
Others in your office are asking me to rectify the situation with the customers but i cannot because Im receiving the exact dollar amount that was in the customers orders. They are just paying more in currency fees to you. I cannot refund that money because it is money you are making not I.
This makes very good business sense and if you look at the amount of money Im funneling to you it would be much easier to double that if we can leave our customers with the understanding that you are not changing the currency on them.
Thank you for your consideration of this. In the mean time I will be posting your policies with currency conversions in the final check out page for customers who choose credit card payments in hopes that this will eliminate some of the complaints you are receiving.
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Thank you for your suggestions on this issue. The automatic currency change based on the customers IP address is a feature the we provide for our customers convenience. This feature cannot be removed from the purchase routine. Your suggestions on displaying the currency symbols and exchange rates could be very useful to our mutual customers. We have submitted your feature requests to our developers for possible integration into our system on future roll outs.