Wednesday, January 27, 2010

International orders welcome...

This year we want to take Shoes of Prey to the international market. One problem though: up until now we've only supported transactions in Australian dollars. Consequently international orders/press haven't exactly been off the charts.

This week we fixed this. We now support the following currencies:

  • US dollars
  • Japanese Yen
  • Canadian dollars
  • Euros
  • Pounds
  • New Zealand dollars
  • Australian dollars

It will be interesting to see what impact this has on our conversions, however we've already noticed an uptick of European blogs posting about us.

On a technical level, we're using the free IPInfoDB IP database to determine the user's likely country, and then we choose the currency from that. We then store the currency in a cookie. You may also notice that it takes 2 pageviews for the correct currency to turn up. This is because we detect the currency while the first page is loading. However that's okay because that is usually the homepage, which doesn't contain prices.

Please test it out for us and let us know what you think! Did we select the best currency for you?
Posted by Mike Knapp at 12:10 PM

5 comments:

  1. I'm keen to here how you go with this as I'm wanting to do the same thing.

    Regarding the currency, have you considered a small Ajax script to detect and update prices?
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  2. Hi Seb - yes, I had considered doing this. But I actually think I'll move to detecting the currency on the server side, instead of using JavaScript. I actually didn't think through the solution fully, and only realized while I was implementing that the prices on the page may be incorrect once we have detected a better currency....
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  3. I'm no programmer... (^_^)

    But, I have been reading the Practical WebDesign magazine and there's an article that talks about this topic.

    Its the November 2009 issue (or issue 195). Page 88 to 90 - "/PHP/make your site location-aware"

    It talks about creating a MySQL database and crearing an index.php file to query the database.

    Relevant?
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  4. Thanks Daniel. Yeh, it's relevant, however we're using a different database architecture that makes it impractical to maintain a database like this. The API works fine for now though. Thanks for the suggestion! :)
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  5. In Abu Dhabi it comes up as USD which is the best bet. What happens if a gift voucher is bought in Abu Dhabi for some one in Aus?
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