Pricing: do you care about the currency?

Yeah I think if you can only pick one currency, USD is your best option.

Having a bag of currencies may be very handy especially if you have suppliers who charge in various currencies. By avoiding conversion you can in fact save single-digit %% of your revenues which would otherwise be eaten by banks.

It will probably hurt your conversions with regards to potential US customers. I think EU people are likely less put off by seeing prices in USD than vice-versa, just because it's far more common to see USD. As @thomasm1964 points out, you would probably be better off adapting to the local currency.

I built a drop-in JavaScript snippet that will change the price to the user's local currency: https://www.idiopage.com/priceLocal. That's a good first step but it's just a cosmetic change. To do this properly you will probably need to add some server-side code.

I think it does care. My former company our customers were basically Europeans so Euro was a natural choice, but for example, my new project https://apility.io my customers can be from anywhere. I decided to go to US dollars though I was based in Europe because of these reasons:

• All customers should pay the same price no matter where they are.
• If you allow different currencies you have to deal with the price exchanges, and believe me, this is something that can be a terrible headache for your accountants later on.
• Onboarding is simpler with a single currency. Don't make your users think.
• Less complains because of currency exchange adjustments.
• As expected, my Euro customers only represent 20% of the total. US customers are about 40-45%.
• Some countries are used to pay in US dollars, but not in Euros. For example all American countries.

Accepting payments in US dollars in Europe is not an issue. Your gateway should allow you to create a Merchant account in US dollars even on a European bank account. They will charge you a commision on all transactions, but you will only see euros in your bank account.

This is the positive thing of having payments in US dollars, but you will have to face several trade-offs:

• Your gateway will take a percentage of all the transactions because of the currency exchange. You have to take this into consideration in your business plan.
• Your accountants will have to match every invoice with the value in your bank account, and this will change because of the volatility of US<->EUR. You have to be very patient and disciplined giving your accountants the information as soon as possible.
• Volatility will impact your margins. A strong US dollar vs Euro is not the same as a weak US dollar vs Euro. And vice-versa. Be conservative in your business plan.

Hope this helps!

This comment was deleted 4 years ago

This comment was deleted 7 years ago