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Question
Do you sell in an unpopular currency? Does it bring any challenges for sales?
I'm in a country where Stripe is not available, and no local provider offers multicurrency charges yet. For me, it's been a long standing hurdle in my mind for local creators to compete internationally.
Stripe Atlas and foreign incorporation is generally available, but exchange control laws make it laborious to be an solopreneur owner of a foreign company locally.
Merchant of Record services are the easiest bandaid solution, but their costs are high and for remittance they're potentially unnecessary. They can also be stricter on the kinds of businesses they accept since they're legally liable.
The final option is to emigrate.
For those of us that don't do that, or have other experiences selling things outside of EUR/USD/GBP/CHF, I'd like to hear your experience. Do you have customers from outside your currency country? Do you hear complaints about the exchange rate?
Stripe Atlas and foreign incorporation is generally available, but exchange control laws make it laborious to be an solopreneur owner of a foreign company locally.
Merchant of Record services are the easiest bandaid solution, but their costs are high and for remittance they're potentially unnecessary. They can also be stricter on the kinds of businesses they accept since they're legally liable.
The final option is to emigrate.
For those of us that don't do that, or have other experiences selling things outside of EUR/USD/GBP/CHF, I'd like to hear your experience. Do you have customers from outside your currency country? Do you hear complaints about the exchange rate?
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I've enabled all available currencies on all my products via Paddle, and customers definitely prefer buying in their own currency. Can't say for sure, but just looking at the transactions of the last week, there's about 15 different currencies being used.
I started with just USD and EUR enabled, and got ~50% growth when I enabled the other 29 currencies.
Used to get complaints about the conversion rate, at which point I started a quarterly review to mark down prices based on country GDP. Added another ~15% from that.
If you have a provider (MoR or other) that supports it, just enable all the currencies they have.
That's really interesting, and a nice simple approach to Purchasing Power Parity which I didn't even talk about in the OP.
By the way, I forgot to mention there are services out there that calculate the GDP difference in real-time and provide the cost to individual visitors (most auto apply coupons to adjust the base price), but checking and adjusting prices every quarter is more than enough. 🙂
I use Lemonsqueezy and don’t find it unnecessary at all. Yes, on one hand I’m not doing significant revenue - on the other hand, ignoring sales tax compliance rules is a bit like just not paying your income tax and hoping for the best. I take a stance that anything related to legal/payments needs to be done correctly “to the T” - I don’t want a disgruntled customer (obviously I’m going to provide good service, but some people are unreasonable) calling some government to complain about me and actually having a case because I’m not paying my taxes properly. Glad to eat a 5% revenue cut vs. 2.9% + 0.30 + extra stripe tax fees to not have to worry about any of this stuff. I don’t buy the author’s argument either, he says MoRs are worth it for single payments only but he “can’t justify it” for subscription payments - it’s literally the same thing. If you make 1000 subscription sales or 1000 single use sales the same amount of sales tax is being collected and it’s an identical situation.