Multi-currency: Advanced Settings

WooCommerce Multi-currency is an extension that provides switching currencies and re-calculating rates on-the-fly.

Currency Symbols

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The most common case when you need to customize the currency symbols is when you have to deal with a variety of Dollars: US Dollar, Canadian Dollar, Australian and New Zealand Dollars, and so on. By default, they all have the same sign: $. For your customers to see which one, you can add prefixes or suffixes to the dollar sign:

Price formats

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There are situations when you might not like the WooCommerce default price formatting. For instance, you might want to show “руб.” for Russian Ruble instead of the default “RUB”:

Price Conversion Settings

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Rounding

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After currency conversion, prices might look “unattractive”. The currency rates that you will be receiving from the providers have four or more digits. For example, $1 US Dollar can be equal to $1.23456 Canadian Dollars. Then, your US customers will enjoy the products priced at $10, $50, $100 – but Canadians will see $12.35, $61.73 and $123.46! Let’s round the prices to the whole dollars. Enter “1” in the “Round up to” field, and the Canadian prices will become $13.00, $62.00 and $124.00 respectively. If you enter “5”, the prices will be rounded to $15.00, $65.00 and $125.00.

Psychological Pricing (“charming”)

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Psychological pricing (also price ending, charm pricing) is a pricing/marketing strategy based on the theory that certain prices have a psychological impact. Retail prices are often expressed as “odd prices”: a little less than a round number, e.g. $19.99 or £2.98. There is evidence that consumers tend to perceive “odd prices” as being nearly lower than they actually are, tending to round to the next lowest monetary unit. Thus, prices such as $1.99 are associated with spending $1 rather than $2. — “Psychological pricing.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

In the previous example, we rounded the prices to the nearest 5. Now, enter “0.01” into the “Price charm” field. The prices will change to $14.99, $64.99 and $124.99.

Conversion Fee

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You can compensate the fees your bank applies when you convert the funds back to your local currency – by adding the equivalent conversion percent.

Best Practices and Recommendations

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• All three parameters of the Price Conversion Settings work together. For instance, you might not notice any changes in prices when you add a conversion fee because rounding already compensates that.
• The conversion settings are the same for all price ranges. If your Shop has a great variety of products, some priced at $1-10 and others at $1,000-10,000, you probably won’t be able to round to the nearest hundred dollars.

So, please “play” with the figures to find the optimum settings. Rounding to 1 and charming to 0.01 should be a safe start. Thank you for your interest in WooCommerce Multi-currency!