How Important Is Foreign Currency To A Small Business Website?

One of the main reasons I love living in Australia and working online is how weak the Aussie dollar is compared to the USA. The difference is not as “good” as it used to be, but there is still around an 15%-20% benefit on the dollar when I make a sale in USD.

I have some friends who sell online in USD and live in places like Malaysia where the dollar is significantly weaker than the USD. In some countries $500 USD is equivalent to a months salary for the average worker, and for Internet marketers they can make that in a day. If you can get to $1000 USD in profits online per month, which isn’t too hard with a little effort, in countries like Malaysia you can live like a king (thinking of moving to Asia?).

The online world is truly a global economy and while the USD is the main currency, there are reasons to consider offering other currencies, especially if you target a specific country that is likely to shun your services if they don’t see local prices.

I bring all this up because I’ve just been sent a sponsored review request from Dynamic Converter, a service that lets you display your web site product prices in your visitor’s currency and your business currency simultaneously.

Depending on the markets you target, a service like Dynamic Converter can be very helpful. Viewing their website homepage you can find examples of how the currencies are displayed, which are simple and clean. There is a free service you can try out to test on your site, and you will find paid upgrades which provide additional services like tax calculations and less restrictions (remove the button advertising the service).

What I like about this service is how simple and focused it is. The company offers one thing and I expect if they have sound business goals they hope to position themselves in the market as the default provider of currency conversion for websites. They face competition from shopping carts that provide currency conversions built-in, I’m never sure how accurate they are though, and other similar services you can plug into your site to perform conversions.

Dynamic Converter has a great testimonial in the Australian online shop dstore.com.au, which is a real blast from the past for me – I remember watching this company back in the dot com boom days when it was the focus of speculation and venture capital. I’m actually surprised to see it still running, but it does have a solid and well established brand online in Australia.

The Dynamic Converter website does an okay job of selling the service, it’s clean and simple and focuses on examples as the main sales tool. I think it could use some work on how the examples are displayed and perhaps a little more copy should be added both as a selling aid and to help with the site’s search engine optimization.

If you sell online and offering different currencies for overseas buyers might increase sales, the free service from Dynamic Converter could be the perfect system to run a test with. As always I recommend testing before deciding to purchase since the outcome could reduce sales, you want to be certain that you will actually benefit long term before committing funds to a program like this.

Yaro Starak
Loving Euros