X-Cart forums

[craichead]

This is a need that I have for my storefront. We are US based and purchase a lot of items from EU and GBP vendors. We need a mod that allows you to enter the price in a certain vendor's currency in the admin and then DISPLAYS in USD based on the exchange rate.

For example.

Widget A is from England and is 5 pounds. We enter 5 pounds as the price in the admin and it displays to the customer(if the rate is 2xs the dollar) as $10... then if the dollar goes weak or strong, the prices automatically update. This would prevent you from having too low or too high a price. Often times we get calls that say... "Hey, why are you so much cheaper than buy straight from the vendor... or Hey... why are you charging so much more than than the vendor..etc..."

I see a lot of stores online where if this is the case, the proprietors say "please call for current price"... this would be a pain as we have a ton of products and have enough orders that we can't be taking calls on every order that comes through.

Does this make sense? I used to have this mod on an old asp based storefront but now that I've moved to xcart, need to build it again.

That all said, I have an in-house php programer. I want to see if there's any interest so that maybe we could share the expense of putting out a mod such as this.

Your thoughts, let me know.

Best,

Blayne Chastain

[Asiaplay]

My understanding is that you plan to make a mod which makes product prices dynamic (based on product prices being in different currencies - not all in USD on your system).

I understand most people use a standard conversion of product cost (to say USD at point of purchase) prior to adding the product and find this will be accurate enough.
To be honest most probably buy stock in just one currency (so do not even do that).
I guess in your case you need to have dynamic product costing based on today's current exchange rates... as this effects your stock buying price too much... interesting

Therefore most people only worry about the matching of USD (or installed default currency) to the currency a customer would want to buy in, using one of two solutions:-

A) Most people use the currency mod found in the forums... which allows people to change the currency on the site to manually select the currency to view products in.

B) I myself I use another mod which shows ~Euro or whatever local currency is for a customer (based on the person's IP address). I then just show USD rates on Products and Checkout pages - with the local currency ~ prices as a guide to the right or below the USD prices).

So I guess not too many will be interested as for most there is not a need to dynamically calculate product prices (where products in X-Cart system are held with different currencies for different products, rather than all being stored in USD).

Just some comments on why most people have probably not shown interest yet.
But is an interesting module... and must be useful to some people.

Cheers, Asiaplay

[craichead]

Asiaplay,

Yep... It's a nichy mod for sure. It was great for us when we had that implemented on our older storefront. For me, it's just a pain to have to update prices everytime I receive inventory. Also, I have some items that are made to order (items are made in Germany, England or Ireland and sold in my US store) and are thus not inventory items so for these especially it's handy to have the prices update dynamically each day based on the current rate.

I figured there would be minimal interest but for those that are in niche businesses like myself, it's really handy. Due to the complexity of the mod I'd estimate that I could sell licenses for about $200 a piece.

Thanks for your input Asiaplay.

Cheers,

Blayne Chastain

[Asiaplay]

Balyne,

Thanks for taking comments positively, as they were intended (appreciated - as know you have put a lot of work into this).
It is a great module for people who need this feature (and sometime I might need it for sure) - so will keep it in mind.

I think to be honest a lot of people / store owners have not thought as far as you have (or have the forget about it attitude, as standard X-Cart can not do this).

But really it is a great module for people using drop shippers from different countries or suppliers from different countries (it would mean they are not losing on exchange rates when the deal is actually done or the time comes to buy replacement stock).

Really is a great idea... and I will keep in mind for the time which I am sure will come and I have the for a module like this (at the moment I am the manufacturer / supplier basically or partnered with the owner, so just use one currency for all products - but with the next store... I might not be )

I really hope people read your post here and understand / recognise the usefulness of what you have created.

Cheers - Asiaplay

[Darryl]

This would be a very useful mod. I have suppliers in both US and Canada and being able to enter the price in the suppliers currency and have it convert would be great. There has to be more than a few people who could really make use of this. A comment was made about whether people have thought that far ahead, so sit back relax and imagine . You will realize how useful this could really be.

[craichead]

Great stuff Daryl. You get it... now it'd be great if we could get another 4 folks or so to sign up for it... I'll be looking into it more when I return from vacation on Tuesday, March 18th.

Best,

Blayne

[spacechampion]

I would love to have this mod for LiteCommerce. I'm just building a site for a customer now who uses drop shipping for all products, from US, Canada and UK so far. I'm eady to upload products... having to convert prices to one currency would suck, as there are thousands of products for upload soon.

[craichead]

You'd want to add products through a product import anyhoo... in which case you could add the conversion rate and calculate it globally on your spreadsheet which you could then convert to csv. That's how I do it right now which you're right, is a bit of a pain. I just want to "lick it and stick it". If you're interested in this sort of mod, I'd encourage you to go with xcart as there will probably be more mods down the pike you'll want and it is much more robust and widely supported... You'll also want to think about how to get products into your accounting software such as quickbooks... which thub by www.atandra.com is great for.

Cheers,

Blayne

[spacechampion]

For exporting to Quickbooks, there is a free add-on module for LiteCommerce that already does that.

LC was already purchased by the site owner so that's what I'm working with. I've found a nice php script to automatically grab currency rates from the European World Bank once a day (in EUR), so I can use that to have live currencies, but I'll have to convert the numbers to use the USD as the base currency, or rewrite the script for accepting data from a XML feed of USD rates (if I can find a free one of that -- the Federal Reserve Bank has decided to stop publishing rates since commercial ones are available). I'm delving into the LC developer kit to learn how to create a module for this currency converter too, so maybe I can offer this to other LC users.

Next would be then to create an LC mod for accepting product prices in different currencies (should be straight forward if it works as I imagine it), and using the currency converter mod to find out what that is in my USD base currency to update that.

[craichead]

Good stuff. Keep us posted and perhaps we can compare notes on getting something similar for x-cart.

B