Are you thinking about setting up an e-commerce site or making products available for sale worldwide? If so, then it’s a good idea to think about providing users with currency conversion.
Currency conversion allows your visitors to have the price of an international currency amount translated to their local currency at the purchase or checkout phase. It also lets visitors view the exact amount their card or PayPal account will be charged, expressed in their home currency.
One great advantage of displaying currency conversion is that it lets customers view and understand pricing in foreign countries in their own local currency, and makes it easier for customers to work out their costs and expenses.
If you are a WordPress user, you can add currency conversion via a plugin to your WP website, allowing your customers to quickly determine the cost of your products.
Currencyr – Free Currency Converting Tool For WordPress
Currencyr is a simple yet advanced, intuitive, easy-to-use and complete currency converter plugin with a beautiful and unique converter tooltip. Best of all, it’s free to install and use on your WordPress site.
Some of the many features of this plugin include:
- Inline converter
- Supports a number of exchange rates providers, like Yahoo!, Google, Open Exchange Rates, European Central Bank and FoxRates
- Support database cache driven for fast response
- Widgetized currency table and converter
- Supports integration with various e-commerce plugins like WooCommerce, WP-eCommerce, Shopp, and Easy Digital Downloads.
- Automatically detects local currency
- Full translation support
Note: This plugin needs your server to be running PHP 5.3.0 or later. Do not install this plugin if you are running an older version of PHP on your server. Ask your web hosting support team to check and upgrade your PHP.
***
You can install the plugin from your WordPress admin area by typing in “currencyr” into the Plugins search field and clicking “Install Now” …
After you have installed and activated the plugin, you can visit the plugin’s settings section by choosing Currencyr from your WordPress administration navigation menu …
This takes you to the plugin settings page …
For example, you can select a base currency from the Base Currency drop-down menu. The default option is ’USD’ …
Similarly, you can choose which data provider you want to use from the dropdown menu in the ‘Provider’ section. The default option is Yahoo Finance, but you can choose one of the other options, like FoxRate or Open Exchange Rates …
Note: If you select ‘Open Exchange Rates’ as your provider, you will need an API (Application Programming Interface) ID …
You can select how often you want the exchange rates to update by choosing an option from the ‘Update Rates’ drop-down menu …
The plugin uses jQuery, which is an open-source library of Javascript code that lets web developers add things like animation effects to web applications (e.g. WP plugins).
Unless there is a reason to modify the jQuery settings, you can simply ignore this section …
Edit the remainder of the settings and don’t forget to click ‘Save Changes’ when done …
When you have finished configuring your settings, you can easily add currency conversion to any WP page using shortcodes.
Refer to the ‘Additional Plugin Notes’ section further below to learn more about using currency codes (e.g. USD, AUD, ZAR, etc …) with the Currencyr plugin.
How To Use Shortcodes
You can add currency conversion to pages, posts and widgets with no programming skills or knowledge using shortcodes.
Let’s take a look at some examples of currency shortcodes that you can add to WordPress pages and posts:
Let’s say that you sell an item on your site for a fixed price (e.g. $175) in US Dollars (USD), and you would also like to display your price converted into British pounds (GBP) on your product information page.
To display this information, you simply need to insert the shortcode below into your page content …
Note: You can also display amounts in dollars and cents (for example, 165.49, 79.45, 400.00, etc …)
The screenshot below shows how your shortcode looks when inserting it into your post …
Once your page has been published, the currency conversion will display like this …
Using this example, let’s also display the same price into multiple currencies.
To do this, use the shortcode shown below (add as many currency symbols as you want separated by vertical pipes) …
You can see how the above shortcode appears when inserted into a post …
Once the post has been published, the currency conversion will then appear like this …
refer to the ‘Additional Plugin Notes’ section further below to learn more about changing the currency separator symbol with this plugin.
Now, suppose you would like to use a different base currency than the one set as the default.
For example, say you have specified your default base currency as EUR and you have a section on your e-commerce pages targeted to customers in countries like Australia or Canada, you can change the base currency using the following shortcode …
Here’s how the shortcode looks when you add it to a page …
After publishing the post, your currency conversion will then appear as shown in the screenshot below …
How To Use The Currencyr Widget
You can also add currency conversion to your site’s sidebar using the Currencyr widget.
To add the currency converter to your sidebar, select Appearance > Widgets in the WordPress user admin menu …
In the Widgets > Available Widgets area find the ‘Currencyr’ widget and add it to an ‘Active Widgets’ area …
Configure the widget options as shown in the example below (add currency codes separated by a comma), and click ‘Save’ to update your settings …
Your currency conversion tool will now appear on your sidebar menu with the settings you have specified when configuring the widget …
Additional Plugin Notes
This section contains additional information about using the Currencyr plugin.
Currency Separator
The Currencyr plugin allows you to specify the symbol to display as the currency separator when using several currencies.
You can select a different symbol in the ‘Multiple Separator’ settings field.
So, for example, entering the default symbol “/” (forward slash) …
Displays your currency values separated by the forward slash as you can see in the example below …
If you enter another symbol and resave your settings …
Your site visitors will see the new symbol used as the currency separator …
Integration With WordPress e-Commerce Platforms
As mentioned earlier, the Currencyr plugin can be integrated with various WP-compatible e-commerce plugins like WooCommerce, WP-eCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads …
(image sourced from plugin website)
Congratulations! Now you can go and easily add a currency converter to your e-commerce web site.
To learn more about WordPress e-commerce plugins, see the tutorial below:
***
"I love the way your email series "Infinite Web Content Creation Training Series" is documented and presented. It is very absorbing and captivating. The links and tutorials are interesting and educational. This has motivated me to rewrite my content following the concepts I am learning from the email series." - Mani Raju, www.fortuneinewaste.com