Adapting e-commerce payment methods for local markets

Find out your customers' preferred payment methods

You'll be able to find this out by doing online research and speaking with experts – such as independent payment providers for international transactions who specialise in helping businesses like yours abroad.

You can also talk to your current UK payments provider as they’re likely to have international solutions, and experience of taking payments in your chosen markets.

Enable different symbols and characters on your website

Some languages use different characters, such as accents on names. And in some cases they use an entirely different alphabet such as Cyrillic in Greece or Hiragana in Japanese. So, make sure you give your users the ability to input payment information in their native language.

Set up your checkout set up for payments in a new market

Once you know how your customers want to pay, and the currency they’ll be using, you just need to find a payments provider to work with. Most payment providers will give you the option to use a plugin for your checkout.

The plugin will recognise when a customer is in a certain location, and automatically select which payment options for that country. For example, in Nordics countries they often have payment on invoice, by bank transfer - so this option will be automatically set at the top of the list.

Keep payments secure for your customers

For example, you may want to consider setting maximum spend caps and look at adding additional layers of authentication for any payment details you store online. And you’ll need to ensure you abide by the data protection rules within the market

You could also add address verification – so that anything ordered from your website or platform goes to the customers’ agreed delivery addresses.

Adjust your pricing to take account of currency conversions

The same marketing principles apply abroad. If you convert your pricing into a different currency, make sure it will still encourage customers to buy.

For example, if something cost £10.99 in the UK and it converted to 12.96 Euros, you may consider resetting the Euro price at 12.99.

Likewise, you need to adjust pricing for any fees or charges taken by your payment provider for converting to and from a local currency.

Decide if you need to keep payments in different currencies

You’ll probably want to convert your payments to pounds sterling and keep them in a UK account for simplicity.

For example, if you have a couple of orders a month from the US and a couple of orders a month from Europe and Africa, you don't need anything more complex than your domestic business account.

But if you’re a larger business, you may need individual accounts in different currencies. For example, so you can pay your suppliers in a region quickly.