Now Using “Stripe” and Supporting Multiple Currencies in the Shop

Yesterday I made some changes to the back end of the DIY Packraft shop to make payments easier for people outside the US. The most noticeable change is that now prices can be displayed in your local currency, and you can pay in that currency so you won’t have those annoying foreign currency fees added to your credit card bill.

The shop attempts to predict your home currency based on your location – if your browser’s location was not determined correctly, you can select your desired currency from the drop-down menu in the sidebar. If you are browsing from a country where the currency is not yet supported, prices will default to US dollars. (Please leave a comment below asking me to add your currency.)

Prices are still pegged to the US dollar, so they may change periodically as exchange rates fluctuate, but now the price you see is the price you pay, and there is no markup compared to the US dollar – the exchange rates are the same rates you see online.

I have also changed the payment gateway from PayPal to Stripe. Stripe is equally well known and equally secure, and it works in more countries than PayPal and it charges no fees for cancelled orders. As with PayPal, I see none of your credit card information when you check out using Stripe – the transaction is handled by Stripe and it is completely secure.

Speaking of security, you may have noticed that now the DIY Packraft website is secured with SSL/https. You can see the green lock symbol in your browser’s address bar, which means all data travelling back and forth between your device and the DIY Packraft server is encrypted and secure.

As I continue to add more currencies to the shop, I need your help to make sure the prices are formatted correctly. It is surprisingly difficult to find reliable information about price formatting standards for different currencies – websites contradict each other, so I will ask for your expert opinion. If your currency is not displayed correctly or it is not yet listed in the drop-down menu, please post a comment below telling me:

• What country/currency you are referring to (e.g. Euros).
• The correct placement of the currency symbol (to the left or right of the number, with or without a space between the symbol and the number). In this example – €1.234,56 – the € symbol is placed to the left of the number with no space between.
• Whether or not your currency uses decimals and, if so, what is the decimal separator (usually “.” or “,”) and how many digits should be displayed to the right of the decimal. In the example above, the decimal separator is “,” and there are two digits to the right (56).
• What is the standard thousands separator? Usually it’s a comma, a period, or a space (“,” or “.” or ” “). In the example above, the thousands separator is a period (“.”).
• Anything else I should know.

Changing these parameters will have no effect on the price you pay – it will just format the numbers so they look similar to what you see in your local shops. I think there is some variation in standards between countries within the Euro zone, so maybe the loudest voices will win 😀