You Like Knowing Exactly How Much Money You're About to Commit your Credit Card to...

Well, so do your customers

One of the best things about doing business on the Internet is that you have the whole world to market your products or services to. The reality is that most of your customers will come from the US, Canada, Australia, Great Britain and a few other European countries... but if you are prepared to fulfill them, you may get orders from the remotest regions of the world!

One of the problems of doing international trade is that at times your customer has no idea what dollar value they are about to commit to. For example, if you live in Canada and are doing business with a US based company, you generally know that for every hundred US dollars you are spending 147 Canadian dollars. But what about if you are going to do business with a company based in Australia? Or one based in England? Or what about France. Do YOU know the conversion rates?

On the reverse side of the coin, say you own a Canadian company and are selling your products or services in Canadian dollars. A large number of your customers will likely be coming from the US. If this is the case, a huge benefit to your American customers is the fact that for them, the price is greatly reduced. Instead of paying $100 for your product, they pay only $68! They are getting more than a 30% discount without having to do anything... and you may want them to be able to see this for themselves!

Depending on what products or services you are offering, a currency converter on your site could be a very nice customer service tool.

If you have the skills, you can write yourself a small conversion program using JavaScript. The problem with this is that whenever currency rates fluctuate, you will have to manually go back in and change all the rates. This is a lot of work... and since I preach automation, automation, automation... I'm suggesting you not do it this way.

What I do suggest is looking at a couple of the currency conversion programs currently available to you. Listed below are three websites that provide free currency converters that will keep visitors at your site, rather than linking them out, this is very important. You want to retain visitors at your site so that you can lead them to making a purchase decision. You do not want them linking out to a different site, as they may never come back!

Xenon Laboratories has a free currency converter program for use by webmasters. For general information on their program go to http://www.xe.net/map/#webmasters If you want to get their free currency converter go to http://www.xe.net/ucc/customize.htm

Textor Webmasters Currency Converter, located at http://cconv.textor.com/ is a nifty little JavaScript converter with easy to follow instructions. Best of all, it's free!

At Oanda you can build yourself a customizable currency converter for free by giving them a site link and allowing banner ads on your conversion page... if you do not want the banner ads, you can get the service for a small monthly fee. Check it out at http://www.oanda.com/site/ccc_intro.shtml

Important Note: Having a currency converter is not as critical for most US based businesses generating sales in US dollars. The reason for this is that most businesses worldwide consider the US dollar to be international, it is almost standard. So if you run acompany that does business internationally, you should look at getting something that will convert a wide range of currency, and not necessarily just to and from the US dollar.