The ultimate driver of growth for any merchant is increasing the number of customers they can acquire and retain. With increasing competition and changing economic climate, ecommerce merchants are taking advantage of their digital backbone to expand to international markets faster than ever before. However, in today’s globalized economy, merchants need to be able to sell their products in multiple currencies to reach customers in different parts of the world.
Until very recently, this required merchants to choose between options that were either very expensive or had a poor customer experience . Often, it would be a combination of both.
Last year, Shopify released Shopify Markets, which offers a multi-currency feature, enabling merchants to sell to multiple markets from one storefront. Our team at Recharge saw an opportunity to extend the same capabilities to subscriptions via thoughtful integration with Shopify Markets.
Available to stores using our Shopify Checkout Integration (SCI), Recharge has built the most comprehensive multi-currency solution in the market. Today, we’re excited to share its release.
“At Recharge, our goal is to create a frictionless commerce experience. When Shopify Markets became available, it was a no-brainer for us to build multi-currency support and empower our merchants to improve their international customer’s subscription experience.”
–Jenna Fishman , Product – Core Commerce
Integrated with Shopify from the ground up
From the very beginning, we understood that merchants wanted a unified experience. While simple on the surface, selling in multiple currencies can add a lot of complexities to merchant operations. A unified configuration tool can prevent unnecessary errors and losses.
By integrating with Shopify Markets, enabling multi-currency is just a few clicks away. Once a merchant enables multiple currencies in their Shopify Markets portal, Recharge will seamlessly and automatically reflect the same configuration across all key merchant/customer touchpoints.
In other words, it just works.
One of the significant advantages of using Recharge multi-currency with Shopify Markets is the support for currency conversion for recurring orders, which is crucial for businesses that operate on a subscription model. Shopify will automatically convert the payment amount into the customer’s local currency at checkout. For subsequent shipments of the subscription, Recharge will ensure customers pay the same price and in the same currency as checkout, regardless of changes in the exchange rate. At the same time, if an existing subscription is modified, Recharge will immediately convert the currency for the updated product(s). Finally, merchants will continue to receive their payout in the store’s default currency to accurately manage their business.
Built into the very foundation of our platform
For Recharge, multi-currency is more than a checkmark on a feature list. As our merchants continue to grow at an accelerated pace, we see multi-currency as a core feature that should be available to all our merchants.
Therefore, to offer true multi-currency support, we overhauled our foundation to ensure our merchants can continue to grow without concern of scalability and flexibility. This means that out of the box, multi-currency will work on:
- Storefront: To display local currency during product selection via Shopify Subscription Widget 2.0
- Customer portal: To ensure subscribers are presented accurate pricing information (value and/or currency) while viewing or adjusting their subscriptions
- Merchant portal: To allow merchant users to view the currencies of transactions and subscriptions within the portal or on data exports
- API: For merchants looking to build custom solutions and experiences, Recharge will also surface currency information across subscriptions, orders and charges API resources
- Notifications: Currency awareness that is built into our email notifications and also supported within our Klaviyo integration
Note: For a complete list of capabilities and considerations, please read our help center documentation.
What does this mean for our merchants?
As we spoke to our merchants, it became clear that multi-currency support represents a significant opportunity to both accelerate revenue growth and reduce operation costs.
“There’s enough confusion during the fertility journey already, we don’t want to add any additional burden onto our customers. That includes the confusion that comes with looking at a credit card statement and seeing a currency conversion fee.”
Shannon Gallagher, Co-Founder & GM, Bird&Be
The following are just some of the key benefits merchants can expect:
Accelerate their revenue growth via international expansion
- By accepting payments in multiple currencies, businesses can attract subscribers from different parts of the world and increase their revenue.
- When customers are able to shop and pay in their own currency, they are more likely to complete their purchase. This helps businesses to reduce cart abandonment rates and increase their conversion rates.
- By offering a seamless and convenient shopping experience for customers in multiple currencies, businesses can differentiate themselves from competitors and attract new customers. This can lead to increased brand awareness and customer loyalty.
Manage a global presence via a lean and efficient organization
- By reducing the number of region-specific stores they operate, merchants with a existing global presence can pay less in fees and save on operational overheads
- For certain stores, merchants can avoid expensive builds that are often limited in scope and challenging to maintain.
- Multi-currency can also reduce support burden and churn. For example: Subscribers purchasing in a foreign currency can get upset and confused when every recurring charge fluctuates due to changing conversion rates
- Merchants can quickly, and at a low cost, test viability of new international markets without investing in a new region-specific storefront with localized currency offering
What’s next?
2023 is an exciting year for us at Recharge, as we charge forward with an ambitious product roadmap. With multi-currency built into our foundation, we’re well placed to further extend the features into more products, including new releases. For example, currently available in our Early Adopter Program, the all-new Affinity customer portal theme will be launched with multi-currency support in addition to multi-language support.
More importantly, we’re looking forward to feedback from merchants. If you’re an existing Recharge merchant on Shopify Checkout, check out help center documentation and enable multi-currency for your store.
If you’re a merchant looking to migrate to Recharge, our implementation team is trained to migrate multi-currency merchants quickly and safely.
