As your business grows and evolves, you may want to start to learn more about international payment processing – it’s easy to assume that it’s just as simple as changing your prices for an international audience. However, international payment processing requires a little more than that, and here are some of the things you need to know.

Multi-currency pricing

It can be really frustrating if you find yourself on a store’s website, only to find that every product on there is in one currency when you really want to know how much it will cost in your currency. It can really put you off wanting to purchase from that site, and your customers will likely feel the same.

By allowing your customers to see pricing in their native currency, you take out any guesswork from converting, and therefore they know that they aren’t going to end up having to pay a mystery amount right at the end and are more likely to add a few more bits to their basket. This has been shown to reduce the number of chargebacks due to disputes on the exchange rate.

Ideally, your system will automatically adapt the exchange rate daily, without you having to do it manually, as, depending on how many products you have for sale, this could take a lot of time and effort that would not be worth the payoff.

If you are then able to receive the deposits in your own native currency, you will find that this is a whole lot easier for your accounting and means you can accurately make projections, without having to do a whole load of conversions.

You will want a system that can create consolidated reports for you using your chosen currency, and that also revaluates the different currencies based on natural fluctuations in worth over time. It’s not as simple as just listing everything in your inventory as an international currency amount, it requires a lot of planning, not only from a customer experience point of view but also in how you process the payments in order to ensure you aren’t losing out in the long-run.

Local regulations

One thing that can be quite tricky when you are selling in multiple countries, is making sure you adhere to each country’s individual regulations. This means using the correct VAT (or equivalent) for each country, setting up accepted security, packaging standards, bank mandates, etc, to ensure that you are closely complying with the rules and requirements made by each country for businesses to follow. This is something that is vital to know inside out before you go into business overseas, as the fines and penalties can be very large.

So, if you are ready to take the leap into taking your business international, hopefully, this will have given you some things to think about and this time next year you will find yourself with a brand new potential audience of international buyers.