Pounds not nickles

My understanding is that PC can be configured to display all costs in UK pounds. How does the gateway know that the fee being charged is in pounds? Does the pounds configuration only work with UK gateways or also with US Gateways?

Specifically. say you sold an item on domain.com for 10 pounds, could you use a US gateway and merchant account to take the fee directly as US dollars and deposited into a US bank? Would the conversion be always transparent to the customer?

Thanks you your help with this.

Hi Mark
Thanks for the prompt response. I understand what you have described - but what if you were running your UK site taking UK pounds payments but had a US merchant bank account and US gateway.

Do you think that it would all be equivalent?

Secondly, I was looking at UK merchant  fees  for UK credit cards - the ones I found were quoting 3.5%, this is very high by US standards. Do you have any recommendations? ( I have both a UK and US address).

Thanks


Edited by geoff - 02-May-2008 at 8:29pm

Hi Katharina
I have recent switched to Nova also. I think the conversion thing is the Direct Currency Conversion (DCC) - but hopefully a customer never needs to "see" into the gateway.

Unless anyone has any other comments on this - I agree it is a question for my merchant bank.

Thank you both

There are different tiers for different "risks".

I recently renegotiated my rates by changing vendor. I previously was using LinkPoint as gateway and merchant and my total costs were 4-4.5% . With my new account they are 2.25-2.5% for the same mix of international, verified and non-verified. The percentage includes all monthly gateway and other fees. The extra few percentage points are significant given my unfortunate low overall gross margins ;-). Rates that merchants receive in the US depend on risk, volume and who you contact. Also the quality of service if you go too far.

My specific rate for a unverified non-US bank card is 3.75% plus 22cent.

By the way - I am much happier with Authorize.net than my previous gateway. I had a spate of fraudulent charge backs which caused a significant loss. I also now have fewer incomplete transactions.

HI Angel
I abandoned setting up a UK site with UK pound configuration. My US site only displays US$. All customers see only US$ on the PC site. The only thing I try to help with is offering a pop-up for currency conversion calculation for non-US customers.

Katharina maybe more help.