Local pricing

Gain a better understanding of the local pricing service, its benefits, and your configuration options.

Local pricing allows you to cater to a global audience by offering a tailored shopping experience on your storefront. By enabling customers to choose their preferred shopping country and currency, you can provide accurate, converted prices, enhancing customer satisfaction and potentially increasing sales.

On this page, you'll find information on:

For details on pairing one of our low-code checkout options with local pricing, refer to Offering local pricing.

Benefits of the service

Digital River's local pricing service offers several advantages that enhance operational efficiency and customer experience. By leveraging this service, you can streamline your pricing strategy across multiple regions, ensuring that your customers receive consistent and accurate pricing information. Below are the key benefits you can expect:

Setting up your account

You must first configure your account to leverage Digital River's local pricing service. This setup includes essential steps and configurations to ensure smooth operation and accurate pricing across multiple regions. Follow these instructions to get started:

Digital River then stores this data in your account, making it available to the local pricing service at run-time.

Base country and currency

The base country and currency settings are fundamental to Digital River's local pricing service. Configuring these ensures that your customers see relevant pricing based on their location and preferred currency, enhancing their shopping experience and potentially increasing conversion rates. This section covers how to assign and manage your base country and currency to optimize the pricing service.

Your local pricing account needs to be assigned a base country and currency.

Digital River retrieves the original prices assigned to elements in your DOM from a list associated with this base country-currency pair.

The values you designate are typically dependent on your trading patterns. For example, if most of your site's customers are in Italy, you'd likely want Italy as your base country and the euro as your base currency.

Each time Digital River performs a currency conversion, your original prices are converted from your designated base currency to the customer-selected target currency.

Your base country may also affect how prices are displayed when your storefront loads. For details, refer to data-dr-default-country.

The data-dr-default-country attribute is only exposed if you're using the DynamicPricing.js library.

Supported countries and currencies

Before deploying, indicate which countries and currencies you want to support.

The local pricing selector lets customers choose from one of your designated currencies. Alternatively, your account can be configured so customers shopping in a specific country are always restricted to using a single default currency.

Taxes

The local pricing service gives you a variety of ways to configure taxes.

You can specify whether to include taxes in your storefront prices for each supported country.

Customers in EU nations typically expect prices to include the value-added tax (VAT), while US customers expect taxes to be added at checkout.

Suppose the values in your DOM price elements are tax-exclusive, and the customer's selected country requires storefront prices to include taxes. You can configure the service to add the appropriate tax amount to your price values.

Alternatively, if you assign tax-inclusive values to your DOM price elements and no such requirement exists in the customer's country. The service can extract the tax portion of your prices and only display their product portion.

Finally, suppose your base prices include taxes, and customers select a country you've indicated should display tax-inclusive prices. In that case, the service can subtract taxes from your values and add back the amount applicable to that selected country.

Your Digital River representative can help determine your optimal tax setup based on your trading patterns.

You can also set country-specific tax rates or apply each country's default tax rate to your product prices.

Fixed prices vs. variable prices

When setting up product pricing for each supported country, you can choose between fixed and variable pricing for your products. Understanding the differences between these two approaches can help you decide which method best suits your business needs and market strategy. This section explores the benefits and considerations of each pricing model.

Fixed prices

Fixed prices allow you to maintain a consistent price for your products, unaffected by currency exchange rate fluctuations. The product price displayed to customers remains the same, providing uniform pricing and simplifying budgeting for your customers.

Variable prices

Variable prices, on the other hand, adjust according to current exchange rates and local currency variations. It means that the prices customers see may change based on market conditions, allowing for more dynamic pricing that can reflect real-time economic changes.

Rounding logic

The local pricing service contains rounding logic that handles the aesthetically unappealing and inconsistent product prices that often result from currency conversions. Exchange rates fluctuate, but these rules help keep your storefront prices stable. For example, rather than presenting a conversion as $124.28, the service might render that price as $123.99 or $125.00.

You can configure a unique pretty pricing rule for each supported currency.

Local pricing selector

The local pricing selector allows customers to select a country-currency combination while shopping on your site.

The selector's country drop-down displays all of your supported countries.

When customers choose a different country, the currency drop-down in the selector defaults to that country's currency. Only that option will be available if you set up your account to conduct all transactions in the selected country's currency. Otherwise, all the currencies saved to your account will appear as options.

Next steps

For details on pairing one of our low-code checkout options with local pricing, refer to Offering local pricing.

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