Setting Up Currency Conversion

Setting Up Currency Conversion

The VPASP currency converter allows customers to display the prices in your shop in a currency that they choose.

How it works

The default currency is configured in the International section of the Online Configuration.

Set the following to your currency. In this example we are using Canadian as the base currency.

xcurrencybase - CAD
xcurrencysymbol - CAD$ or just $
xdefaultcountry - CA
xlanguage - ENGLISH or French Canadian

Submit the changes by clicking the button at the bottom of the page.

The actual currency conversion values are stored in the currencyvalues table in the database.

Each row in this table represents a different currency.

The currency that has "1"in the conversionvalue field is the default currency and controls the master rate. So if your site is to display in Canadian dollars then you would set Canadian to 1.

You can edit and add currency values to this table by entering your shop administration and going to :
Occasional Tasks -> International -> Currency Tables

This page allows you to add a new currency or view and edit the existing currencies. The fields in the currency table are as follows:

id This is automatically generated as the identifier.
cid The short name for this currency (eg. USD or AUD).
fullunitname The long name for this currency (eg. US Dollars or Australian Dollars).
conversionvalue The conversion rate to calculate this currency. Make sure this is 1 for your default currency.
currencysymbol The symbol for this currency (eg. AU$ or £).
theimage The path to the image of the flag for this currency. If you supply an image path the image will be displayed in shopcurrency.asp. If you don't display an image it will be included in the drop down list of currencies on shopcurrency.asp
hide True/False whether this currency should be displayed on your site.

TIP: You can bulk update your table rates by clicking on the Bulk Update link in the left column. This allows you to update all of your currencies at once.

TIP2: You can import new currencies into the currencyvalues table by going to Everyday Tasks > Advanced > Bulk Import. To see what the table needs to look like you can export the currencyvalues table first as a csv file. X-Rates has an export to Excel feature that allows you to quickly copy and paste the rates into your csv file.

Finding Exchange Rates

You can find currency values wherever you like. We recommend http://www.x-rates.com/. Click on the links to the right to have the default currencies for your site.

TROUBLESHOOTING

You may find that some characters such as the Euro and Pound symbols are displaying strangely. eg:

£18.27 = Pounds sterling
€27.05 = Euros


This issue can be the result of having an incorrect charset in your shoppage_header.htm file.

To resolve this issue, you should try setting your charset to UTF-8

For version 6.09 or later, you can update this by changing the language variable langcharset in your shop administration pages. See this helpnote for details on changing language variables

In earlier versions you may need to modify a line of code in shoppage_header.htm or add the line completely. The line should be located directly after the opening <head> tag and should look like:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">



Times Viewed:
4728
Added By:
Cam Flanigan
Date Created:
11/30/2005
Last Updated:
1/22/2007