Whether a merchant sells retail products through a brick-and-mortar storefront or with an online website, there are problems that potentially develop with regard to handling the sale by customers paying in a foreign currency.
The physical shop is likely to discourage, and therefore miss the sale opportunity with transactions in foreign currency. Even if the shop owner is fluent in the fluctuation of currency exchanges – and he or she is tasked with the currencies of potentially over 170 nations, and what shop owner is going to have that volume of information at hand? – the clerks in the shop actually transacting the sale are typically ill-equipped to deal with foreign currency.
An online website merchant is going to have only a little better time of it without taking advantage of current e-commerce currency solutions available. And since the trend in consumer shopping is going online, and because those shoppers can now be located anywhere in the world, the potential for added sales to online shoppers using foreign currency is exploding.
Any merchant in just about any country who has their government’s provision of adequate Internet infrastructure can not only launch an online shop, but can have access to a number of providers of e-commerce currency solutions to solve the issue of handing the shop’s sales transactions.
Such service providers have these basic provisions available to merchants:
– Merchants can price their products in their own local currency. Their physical location and currency used is as immaterial to the process as the location and currency of consumers.
– The service provider acts as an interface between the merchant and his or her credit payment processor and the purchasing customers and the bank issuing their credit cards. This allows the merchant to claim payment through their payment processor from the purchaser’s credit issuing bank in the purchaser’s currency. The service provider then converts the payment into the merchant’s currency at a contracted exchange rate.
– Most service providers also offer adjutant services of use to the merchant, such as fraud protection, leveling of currency exchange volatility over contracted periods of time, periodic reconciliation and reporting services, and even processing merchant outbound payments to foreign suppliers into supplier’s currencies.
Of these added services, one of the most useful and urgently needed services is that of currency exchange volatility leveling. Nothing can be more frustrating to a merchant dealing with e-commerce currency exchange than to see daily fluctuation, making the accounting reconciliation each month a veritable guessing game.
To resolve the frustration, e-commerce currency solutions include the provision of guaranteed exchange rates not only for the duration of any single sale transaction, including the potential events of returns and exchanges, but, in some cases, exchange rate guarantees for as long as up to one year depending on contract details between the merchant and service provider.
These services are also available to the brick-and-mortar merchant to engage whenever shoppers with foreign currency credit cards enter and purchase product.
Any merchant, whether brick-and-mortar or with an online website can take advantage of the services provided by an e-commerce currency solution. For more information, you can follow the link provided below: Ecommerce Currency Solutions.
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