Digital cross-border buying continues to grow in popularity. Based on a survey of consumers in 12 countries, 70% of online buyers made a purchase from a foreign site in 2017. This is six percentage points higher than the previous year1. The main reasons for this increase are lower prices from foreign retailers, as well as brands or products that are not available in the home country2. With this in mind, online merchants benefit from expanding their business into new geographical areas and offering a wider product portfolio to service new audiences.
Amazon Pay is helping merchants and shoppers move beyond their borders with a multi-currency functionality that charges customers the exact foreign currency and amount they see on the website while merchants are getting a streamlined disbursement in their base currency. The feature makes it easier for merchants with a EUR Amazon Pay account to expand their business to new geographies, while eliminating the barriers for shoppers to purchase products wherever they find them.
Through multi-currency, Amazon Pay can help increase conversions, minimize refunds and reduce chargebacks. Customers are more likely to complete a sale if they’re presented with their preferred payment option, currency and language. Shoppers account statement charges match quoted checkout amounts, eliminating currency conversion rate discrepancies, so customers can focus more on the purchase.
When merchants enable multi-currency with Amazon Pay, they can reach new markets around the globe much faster. There’s no need to set up additional (overseas) bank accounts, any local legal entities or multiple Amazon Pay accounts. Merchants can also add any bank account in the SEPA region (34 countries) to their EUR Amazon Pay account. Amazon Pay supports various account/legal entity/bank account country constellations. Read more here.
To remain competitive on a global scale, merchants need to offer familiar payment options that customers in foreign countries trust. By extending a trusted experience to their shoppers, merchants make it easier for 300 million active customer accounts worldwide to check out on their website with their existing Amazon account.
Amazon Pay’s multi-currency functionality also offers an opportunity to reduce overhead and settlement reports. Merchants can automatically convert buyer’s payment into their businesses settlement currency, with disbursement into a single bank account. Information is provided via one set of transaction and settlement reports.
What are merchants saying?
Amazon Pay is a brand our customers know and trust. By adding the multi-currency feature, we have seen an 8% increase in sales as we expanded into the U.S. market.
- Ashley Hubbard, E-commerce manager, Grenson
Amazon Pay multi-currency is working very well for us. About a third of our Amazon Pay sales come from our US buyers, second place after Germany.
- Babak Farahani, Senior Payment Manager, Innogames.de
How does it work?
- On your site, you list prices for items in multiple currencies.
- Your customers shop on your site, and they check out with their preferred currency.
- You pass the currency and the amount to Amazon Pay.
- Amazon Payments charges your customer the exact amount in the currency they selected during checkout.
- Amazon Payments converts the amount into the currency associated with your account (your ledger currency) before crediting the amount to your account balance.
Customers who use VISA and Mastercard will be able to pay in any of the 12 currencies that merchants choose to enable on their website and that are currently supported by Amazon Pay. Any remaining payment methods in the customer’s wallet will be greyed out.
More questions about multi-currency, check out our FAQ.
1eMarketer, Cross-Border Ecommerce Study, 2018
2ComScore, UPS Pulse of the Shopper Global Study, 2018