Setting exchange rates.

[Dockerills]

Can anyone offer any advice on how eCrater currency conversion works re. the various national versions of the site (US, UK, AU)?

I thought I had this worked out so that I had fairly rational price points in both UK and USA i.e. items at £5.00 on the UK site show at $8.00 in the US.

Everything seems to be fine for a matter of weeks or months and then the U.K. prices begin to creep up, £5.00 becoming £5.28 and so on. It seems a little odd when I've fixed the rate at a specific value.

[cosmicray]

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/currency/GBPUSD

Notice the exchange rate fluctuation over the past 3 months.

£5.00 GBP converting to $8.00 USD is $1.60 USD per GBP.

Currently we are at $1.5166. Working backwards that would change the $8.00 USD price to £5.275 GBP. The exact rate was likely close to what I'm seeing, and rounded to £5.28.

Does this help ?

[Dockerills]

Well, at first I thought I could see where the figure might have come from but then I did some more checking and discovered that the percentage increase is not uniform. The thing is that I did set the rate myself at what I thought was a fixed point.

Being in the U.K. I need my £sterling prices to stay constant and $US prices to fluctuate not vice versa. As far as I can see the site can't manage that for me automatically so I've opted for manually setting the exchange rate.

Just to illustrate the problem I sold an item today (in the U.K) which I originally priced at £7.00. When I saw the order the price had been increased to £7.28. It's not a lot of help with exchange rates having prices moved which affect sales where no exchange rate is involved.

[MoonwishesStore]

Silly question probably but are you sure that you aren't seeing the shipping price creeping up? Ecrater does control the shipping exchange after you set the original rate, but I suspect they do the exchange on postage based on the USD rate, not the UK.

Another thing that may happen is if you did a copy paste when making the listing and you set the price at 7.00 GBP and for some reason the listing got an error message and needed to be fixed for say the picture was too big, the title too many characters, etc. If you get an error when listing, the prices of the UK and AU revert back to whatever they had been before you reset them. I discovered this when something sold in the UK for $10.99 that I had priced $6.99 US. Since then I try to be very careful about any error, usually I get them for the title being too long - naturally as I'm a chatterbox!.

Other than that, I set my own exchange rates myself (the AU sure has been crazy lately!) and I never see them changing prices from what I had set them. If you do a master global edit of exchange rates for instance to change US prices, that will change all your old prices and even perhaps somehow change your UK prices.

If it isn't any of these things, then you need to email the ecrater team for help since they can see what has happened. It could very much have something to do with you being in the UK and I don't experience that. I know that those prices don't change on their own, there is something behind it that you obviously need to find out soon.

[cosmicray]

@Dockerills

OK, now I see what the problem is. You want GBP to be the anchor rate, and the others to move up/down. You need to contact the eCrater team directly to see if that is possible.

[Dockerills]

@ cosmicray

Well that would have been ideal but I assumed it wasn't possible. I just settled for fixed prices, I thought.

[Dockerills]

OK, I've done a bit of revision (I haven't looked at the site for a while except to deal with orders) and I think I may understand what's happening. I had thought that I'd entered specific exchange rates into my admin somewhere. I've just checked and there is nothing (no facility) there so I must have got that wrong. What I did find is that I've carried out a couple of global edits at some point to set UK and AU prices relative to US.

I notice that under the Accounts/Options section of the admin tool there is an option as follows -

"Do not auto convert prices in other currencies."

The related help is as follows -

"Select this option if you do not want the prices to be automatically converted to other currencies. By turning this option on, your products will not be listed in international eCRATER marketplaces unless you explicitly use the global editor to set these prices."

So it seems that I should, in fact, have that option ticked.

...... so tick the option and rerun the two global edits for UK and AU currency and I should be back to where I started (only slightly ahead because now my prices should stay where I put them). Does that make sense?

[SheilaDeesPostcards]

Indeed it does make sense. I was just reading the topic and wondering if there was a possibility that you had left "Do not auto convert prices in other currencies" unchecked. So glad you wrote back to let everyone know what you found. With this unchecked, eCRATER will auto convert prices based on the US price on a schedule and with a conversion rate they select. While this makes less work for the seller, it also gives the seller less freedom/control.

[Dockerills]

I think that "By turning this option on, your products will not be listed in international eCRATER marketplaces" must of caught my attention, when I set things up, and the end of the sentence didn't register.

Thanks, I'll go ahead then.

[MoonwishesStore]

Dockerills - As I had mentioned, I set my own rates (except for postage where we can't) and just to assure you, I too have the "no not..." checked as well, which allows me to set my own rates.

It is actually a confusing sentence and would probably work better to have it say "Have ecrater set my currency rates." Because it is a negative you have to think the whole sentence out as a 'reverse' and my dyslexic brain has trouble going in reverse Anyhow with a simpler sentence it is easy for those who want to set their own rates to skip it and those who don't want to, to be very clear that they want ecrater to set them.