If your business collects payments in foreign currencies and you are looking to expand your knowledge you’ve come to the right place. As more people shop online, and it’s far more likely that customers from all across the world are visiting your site with the intention to buy.

If you want to maximize international sales, it’s in your interest as an online vendor of digital products, or recurring subscription services, to provide a shopper-friendly, localized user experience on all your checkout pages. Customers are more likely to complete a sale if they are presented with their preferred currency, payment method, and language. So in order to close more sales, it’s important to partner with an ecommerce solution that can offer this complete package.

Multi-currency payment processing occurs when your business can accept credit cards from customers in foreign currencies. If your business charges customers in more than one currency (for example in US dollars and Canadian dollars) you are doing multi-currency processing.

Multi-currency processing can involve a complex setup of many different billing currencies. For example, you might charge customers in USD, CAD, GBP, EUR, ZAR, AUD and NZD, which would allow you to target customers in all major English speaking countries.

Does your business actually need multi-currency payment processing?

Visa and Mastercard ensure that cards can be used anywhere in the world, easily and without hassle for the cardholder. Even if you don’t cater to foreign customers they can still easily complete a purchase. Their card issuing bank will see that it’s a foreign transaction and will handle all the exchange rate concerns. It just automatically works… so technically speaking, you don’t need to bill foreign customers in their own currency. However, your business won’t be very effective if you don’t.

There are huge, HUGE potential cost advantages with multi-currency processing. This is especially true if you’ve implemented payment processing with like-to-like settlement, which is something we will explore in further detail below.

To reiterate in an explicitly clear manner: an ideally deployed multi-currency processing solution can save many thousands of dollars in processing costs. Interchange optimization (for international payments) is exactly what we specialize in at iPayTotal. It’s why we’ve built a diverse network of strategic bank and processing platform partners. No single or individual bank or platform is the best fit for every business, in every currency, in every country.

With iPayTotal merchant accounts, you can acknowledge payments in multiple currencies. Depending on your business details, you may be able to get payments from credit cards everywhere throughout the world through an iPayTotal travel merchant account. Approved merchants can acknowledge US dollars, British pounds, euros and more.

High-risk credit card processing can be tricky, but it’s not a death sentence for your business. Running any business these days more or less requires that you give your customers the option of paying with credit or debit cards.