When using Shippo API for buying postage and printing shipping labels, shipping rates are returned in the currency of the country you're shipping from. So if you're shipping from Europe they will show in Euro, if you're shipping from United States they will show up in USD.
Is there an API option to show the shipping cost in a different currency (for example, always US dollars)? This problem appears when we display prices for goods in USD, so we need to show the shipping cost in the same currency.
Yes, you can set the rate to the currency of your choice by adding the currency code to the URL as described in the API docs: https://goshippo.com/docs/reference#rates
Related
We have an online platform where we sell our product and we use Paypal to handle payments. Our customers are shown the amount they need to pay in Lek. Since our home currency, Albanian Lek, is not supported in Paypal, we convert the order price in Euro and we pass that to PayPal on checkout.
When checking out, PayPal converts the amount from Euro back to Lek, using their own conversion rates, which charges the customer a higher amount that the one they were shown in the beginning.
We want to be transparent with our customers and we don't want to show them a different amount to be paid when they checkout.
How can we get around this? Our options are:
Get PayPal's conversion rates, do a reverse calculation ourselves and display the right price to the customer.
Have the user pay the exact amount they were told in the beginning and we pay the conversion cost.
Any other ideas than the ones mentioned?
If you have a PayPal account manager, you can ask them about presentment currencies.
Assuming you do not have such a PayPal business contact (most do not), the best solution is to simply display actual EUR prices on your site. An approximate LEK conversion can be shown alongside, if you must, but the EUR price is what will be used for the actual PayPal transaction.
The payer will only see a conversion from some local currency to EUR if they are using a funding source denominated in that local currency.. This conversion happens prior to the EUR payment being made, which again is the actual PayPal transaction between that payer and the receiver account; any conversion from LEK (or other local currency) to EUR is happening before the actual PayPal transaction in EUR
I’m specifically asking about the Currency dropdown menu setting in the Shipping Calculations (Paypal's Payments Standard):
Screengrab here
If, for example, I’m selling an item on my website priced at 10 Euro, but I have set separate shipping prices for ‘Euro' and 'British Pounds', will a buyer paying in British Pounds be charged the different shipping rates I’ve set?
Or, will the British Pounds settings only be used if I’m selling in British Pounds?
So Paypal eventually responded:
I am sorry if there has been any confusion regarding your query. I have double-checked you query and have tested this myself.
The postage calculations can only be set to one currency, for example Euros or Pounds. This section will not allow for different calculations depending on which country or currency the funds have been received from.
Can I use PayPal as currency conversion.
I run a global site, and am introducing multiple currency - USD, GBP, EUR, AUD, YEN.
When a user selects their selected currency I need the prices to reflect the conversion across our web and mobile platform
You can use PayPal to charge buyers in all these currencies, but unfortunately you cannot use PayPal for all your currency conversion and display the prices on your site.
However, if you're selling in GBP and your buyer's funding sources are in EUR, we will of course automatically convert these.
Note; our Adaptive Payments product does offer a 'CurrencyConversion' API call, but this API call is not intended for on-the-fly calculation for your product listings.
I've been working on a minimalist e-commerce website where I am trying to leverage Paypal's Add To Cart and View Cart buttons for the financial aspect of this website. However, I found out if you are not a U.S merchant you are restricted on Paypal's shipping calculator by not being able to calculate shipping by weight and region.
I am looking for alternatives to making a full e-commerce site, where the users do not have to register or type in their personal information or charge a fixed shipping rate for products.
I am curious on what everyone thinks regarding the user experience of a user entering their zip/postal code into an input box and being presented with a total price by estimated shipping prices (from UPS' API, Canada Post's API), and calculating taxes by region for each product. Otherwise, offer an option for the base product price plus a warning that the shipping and taxes are pending without specifying their zip/postal codes. If you have any other ideas, I would be glad to read them!
Thanks for your time!
That's what I typically recommend doing...gathering shipping directly from shipping carrier API's and then passing those values into the shopping cart / payment integration accordingly.
Any PayPal integration you choose would allow you to pass those details in be it Payments Standard, Express Checkout, Payments Pro, etc.
Using Paypal's Adaptive Payments API, I am selling physical items that require a ship to address - on the Paypal purchase page I inform Paypal to have the customer select an address. If I have sales tax rules set up on my merchant account, how do I get Adaptive Payments to add sales tax to the order - I hand it the subtotal, and based on the state in the address the user selects, it calculates and adds the sales tax to that subtotal for a grand total?
Isn't this the entire point of Paypal - customer provides this information to Paypal, and then provides me only the information I need for the transaction?
You're right but AFAIK, since PayPal does not want to keep tax rates which differ for countries and type of goods you ship. So, you can either try using
GetShippingAddresses
api call before executing the payment, and add
totalTax
information during
SetPaymentsOptions
call..
Doesn't seem to be able to compute this on its own - I ended up keeping a hack of a solution in place. Prompt the user to provide the state to which the goods will be shipped to, and then calculate the tax on my own before sending the order total (subtotal + tax) to the Paypal workflow. Disappointing, IMO.