In December 2024, Capitalware’s new online shopping cart, managed by FastSpring, went live.
Over the last few weeks, I have received a couple of angry emails regarding the foreign exchange fee being charged to the order when they are not located in the USA.
During the signup process, I was told that it is far better and more customer friendly to have all currencies selected/available in my store front. The sales rep never mentioned anything about adding a foreign exchange fee to the order checkout process. I had actually read FastSpring’s Currencies and Conversions and didn’t see anything about “Foreign Exchange Fee” but I did notice the paragraph labeled “Markup Rates” but didn’t think much about it.
After getting those angry emails, I contacted FastSpring Support and asked what was going on with the price of the products because it was higher than expected. In one particular case, the customer was trying to pay in Swiss Francs (CHF) but the price was 3.6% higher than expected.
Come to find out, FastSpring charges a foreign exchange fee of between 3.5% to 5.5%. A typical credit card will charge a foreign exchange fee of between 1.5% to 3% (and a few don’t charge any foreign exchange fee), so you can see why I received those angry emails.
I have made a couple of suggestion for FastSpring to improve and provide a better customer experience.
(1) On the checkout window, show a box with 2 radio buttons asking the customer to select either:
Hence, the customer can decide if they like the Foreign Exchange Fee or not.
(2) FastSpring should immediately update the documentation and the words “Markup Rates” be changed to “Foreign Exchange Fee”.
Since, I’m not interested in having angry customers (or resellers) email me about why they paid more for their order than expected, I have disabled all currencies except for USD (Capitalware’s base currency).
For fellow merchants who are using FastSpring, to avoid angry customer emails, I would suggest you go to your FastSpring store and select Settings then Localizations and change this:
to this:
Hence, the foreign exchange fee will be handled by the customer’s credit card and not by FastSpring.
Regards,
Roger Lacroix
Capitalware Inc.
