Increase Sales Globally by Making Your Consumers Feel at Home

Currencies
Showing consumers prices in their local currency helps boost sales and retention.

Selling to consumers outside your home country can be tricky. If your primary business is based, say, in the United Kingdom and the prices on your website are displayed only in Pounds, you could be losing out on international customers who may be interested in your product but aren’t immediately sure how your prices translate to their local currency. Or, perhaps worse, they do buy but charge it back later, after seeing a different price on their credit card statement than they thought they paid at checkout.

By making sure you are giving consumers a localized experience, you can optimize your sales and grow your business as much as possible beyond your own borders. So how do you do it? Segpay merchants can use a three-pronged approach that starts with reporting and combines language translations and localized currency.

Reporting

You have three reports at your disposal to show how your international sales are performing, and help you identify the countries with the best growth potential to target with your marketing efforts:

  • Sales by Country: shows you where in the world you’ve had sales during the specific date range you choose.
  • Approval Rates: shows the % of your transactions that were approved and declined during the specific date range you choose. You can group the report by Country – either customer country (using the consumer’s payment address) or IP country (using the location we detected at the time of purchase).
  • Transaction Detail:  shows you more information about all transactions that occurred during the date range you choose. Select Advanced Options to include country, based on ISO or IP, where each transaction originated.

Perhaps you’ve been targeting a specific country(ies) but after viewing these reports you don’t see the results you were hoping for. What can you do about it?

Localized language

Using the knowledge from the reports mentioned above, you can provide international consumers with the most localized experience possible. Start with making sure you are speaking their language.

Segpay’s payment pages are built with geo-targeting and are displayed according to the language setting in the consumer’s browser. That said, if you are doing your own geo-targeting and are certain where each consumer is coming from, you can force the page to display in one of 12 different languages (See our documentation for more details). Doing your own geo-targeting is the ideal scenario, of course, since you’ll be ensuring that consumers aren’t viewing one language on your website and another on the payment page.

Localized currency

Now that you’ve made sure the words on your payment page are speaking the consumer’s language, make sure your prices are, too. Enter Dynamic Multi Currency (DMC), a feature that ensures you are displaying prices in local currencies. That way, consumers know what they are paying up front, and future recurring charges are consistently billed in the same amounts and currencies as advertised, avoiding confusion or unwanted surprises. Although Segpay has offered DMC for years, some merchants may not be aware of how it works or how best to use it to their advantage.

DMC is turned on by default when you create a payment package. You can select one of two versions:

  • DMC with Base currency – By default, your prices display in the currency you specified in your price points. The consumer has the option, via a dropdown menu, to see the price in one of 16 currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, ISK, DKK, SEK, NOK, CHF, HKD, JPY, CAD, AUD, RUB, INR, ILS or CZK.
  • DMC with Geo-targeting – Prices display in the consumer’s local currency, based on their IP address. Again, the consumer has the option to instead see the price in any of the 12 currencies listed above.

As with language, merchants doing their own geo-targeting can force prices on the payment page to show in a specific currency, and can hide the menu so the consumer can’t change to a different currency. See our documentation for details on this as well.

Watch retention rates rise for international members

If you incorporate localized language and currency for your subscription-based business and are tracking customer retention rates (something that we highly recommend) you may notice that consumers who are rebilled in their native currency are staying with your service longer. Why? Because using local currencies prevents surprises such as a statement arriving later with a converted amount that is different than what the consumer thought was paid. What the consumer sees is what they pay, both initially and in the recurring amount they are charged after each billing cycle. The consumer is locked in, regardless of fluctuating exchange rates. This also means that if at any point someone is not happy and requests a refund, they receive the expected amount and do not feel short-changed, preventing potential chargebacks.

Bottom line, if you are not already marketing your services outside your home country, using reporting, along with localized language and currency should give you the confidence to start now.

Share this post with your friends

Our website uses “cookies” and other technologies, which store small amounts of information on your computer or device, to allow certain information from your web browser to be collected and improve your experience. By using this website, you accept the terms of our privacy policy and cookie policy.