Get Exchange Rates Before Checkout

[Dashiell Bark-Huss]

I am creating a two way marketplace with stripe connect accounts. 

I was using free exchange rate apis, but the free ones keep shutting down permanently. I'm curious if stripe has an internal solution or if anyone can recommend an exchange rate api that is inexpensive but reliable. I am a bootstrapped startup and I haven't launched yet, so nothing too expensive.

I'm also wondering how other developers with global market places handle this?

Reasons I want to know the exchange rates beforehand:

1. I need the exchange rate of the shop owner's currency to USD(my platform currency), because when the buyers checks out, they get to write a note to the shop owner which is the length of 1character per 1USD equivalent spent. This conversion doesn't have to be exact.

2. I'm not sure what's standard practice in global two-way market places, but I looked at Etsy for inspiration. Etsy will convert and display shop prices to the buyer's currency if they support that currency. Otherwise Etsy leaves the product in its original currency and lets the credit card company deal with conversion. So I am copying this model- If a shop owner has their items in GBP and but a buyer is in USD, the buyer should should see the prices estimated to USD.

I understand there are limitations to this when using stripe, because the API I use could be different from stripes. And the exchange rates could change from the time of display to checkout. Because of this,  the shop owner might receive less or more than the price listing. I'm not sure how to handle this besides letting the shop owners know beforehand that they might get a different amount. 

3. I also use the total to calculated fees so I can pass my stripe fees on to the buyer. But without the exchange rate I cannot calculate the stripes fees.

[Remi J.]

Hello!

We don't have an API today that offers exchange rates unfortunately. It's something we have discussed in the past and even had a beta around but it's mostly been deprecated. Today our recommendation is still to use external APIs for this though we know it can be tricky to find a reliable one that suits your needs.

My main recommendation here would be to have your shop owners configure their pricing in the currency they want to accept. Most will likely only want to support one currency, in which case you charge the end customer in that currency and there's no currency conversion. So for the CAD example, you wouldn't attempt to show them an estimate in CAD, you would instead show them the price in USD and charge them in USD. The entire transaction on Stripe would be in USD and the end customer's bank would be the one calculating how much that is in CAD with their own exchange rate and apply that conversion. You have no control over this calculation and while you could guess it is likely going to be incorrect in some cases and it's worse to display an incorrect conversion.

Now if a shop owner decides to price in multiple currencies, you can then show the correct price, which is what you will really charge. In that world, the shop owner has to account for fluctuation of exchange rates over time and price accordingly. That's where you don't charge $121.67 CAD for a $100 USD but instead the shop owner decides that in CAD you charge $130 all the time for example. It has some upsides and downsides too in that world though.

Sorry, I know that's not really the answer you were looking for here but there isn't really a way to guarantee exchange rates upfront like this today.

Best,

Remi

--
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to api-discuss...@lists.stripe.com.