Handling Base Currencies With Magento

Magento has the ability to handle distinct base currencies for multiple shops running off one code base. This offers great flexibility in pricing your products for different territories.

Using a well known online ecommerce store as an example (Apple.com) this article will demonstrate the benefits of choosing Magento commerce as your online shopping platform.

The tutorial will provide you with everything you need to know about configuring Magento Commerce to use multiple base currencies for your clients who trade internationally using fixed pricing for different locales i.e. North American base prices that are different from European base prices.

Article Extract

This example assumes that you serve customers in 3 global locations. You serve:

  1. U.S. customers in U.S. Dollars (USD)
  2. UK customers in Sterling (GBP)
  3. European customers in Euro's (Euro)

When it comes to approaching the architecture of an international store, some firms will have a large array of international domain extensions at their disposal such as .co.uk, .us, eu, .com, etc. However, this approach is not always possible. This could be due to a lack of available domain extensions or maybe you just don't want to force your customers remember different domain names for different regions.

Utilizing a single domain name could be the answer to your problems.

To this end, my demo store will use the domain example.com as the main website serving the most important customer base - U.S. customers and all other websites will be mapped to a folder within the root of store.com. So the three websites we are using are:

  1. example.com - This website uses USD as its base currency. Products are displayed in USD and conversions are mapped to USD.
  2. example.com/uk - This website uses GBP as its base currency. Products are displayed in GBP and conversions are mapped to GBP.
  3. example.com/eu - This website uses Euro as its base currency. Products are displayed in EURO and conversions are mapped to EURO.

Please note: the information within this article was correct as of February 2011.

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