Dynamic Currency Conversion

Sat, 24 February, 2007 – 9:02 pm

I know a lot of people simply put their prices in US Dollars for products on their site but I decided today, whilst working on a shopping site, that I wanted to be able to display both British Pounds and US Dollars. Of course I don't want to be updating the site every other day especially with the current fluctuating exchange rate! So after a quick search I can across Dynamic Converter which offers a free service (for up to 10,000 requests a month). After setting up your default settings you get some JavaScript which you add into your site and that's pretty much it. At first I was looking around and added in some span tags but discovered that you don't need them! (Yes it's really that simple). The JavaScript seems to read your page and whereever you have a price denoted by a price symbol (eg. £ or $) it will automatically add your conversion afterwards in the format you've specified in your settings.nnSo I've simply set it up so that it shows the prices in British pounds (as it's a UK domain and mainly gets UK visitors), but the conversion is shown in US Dollars in brackets afterward eg.nn

£8.99 ($17.62)

nnThe great thing about this is that it's dynamic, so the converted price will always be reasonably accurate. Also despite the use of JavaScript, if a visitor comes to the site with JavaScript disabled then they will simply just see the British price. It's a rare occurance so I'm not too worried about this.nnYou can offer your visitors the option of a variety of currencies, using links, flag icons or a drop down list.nnThis was only the first dynamic converter I came across in a quick search. If anyone knows of any others I'd love to hear about them.

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