Integrating real-time exchange rates into your website or app
Unlike before, when local pricing and currency conversion could be nice, it is now a must for any business that sells goods or services abroad. The fact that an accurate, real-time price is a must for today’s global e-commerce experience means you need to capture as much of this explosive growth as possible, with the ability to show the price.
However, in-house development and maintenance of multi-currency support can be costly. Thus, GeoPlugin’s currency conversion API lets you easily and without taking too much of the precious engineering resources, integrate dynamic exchange rates.
This article explores the business case for real-time currency conversion, how GeoPlugin’s currency API works under the hood, tips for implementation, and example use cases across industries.
The need for automated conversion
To display international prices manually, you need to create localized copies of each product page. Consequently, hosting and management overhead increase exponentially as 160+ world currencies are being circulated. Rates fluctuate daily, and so static conversions are quickly out of date.
The result? Lost sales, diminished credibility with global customer bases, and cart abandonment. In fact, over two-thirds of the online shoppers living outside the US have abandoned their purchases because of the lack of native pricing.
GeoPlugin eliminates these pitfalls. With its API, it detects the location of the visitor by IP address, fetches current currency data, and displays the pricing converted in real time. No duplicate pages needed.
It saves engineering resources and inflationally doubles conversion rates in some instances. Everything is made easy with GeoPlugin because you just deal with your core product.
Under the hood: How it works
GeoPlugin’s currency API is powered by three key stages: geolocation, rate retrieval, and on-the-fly calculation.
First, the service identifies website visitors by their IP address using MaxMind’s industry-standard GeoLite database. This reveals location info like country, city, metro code, latitude/longitude, and local currency.
Next, GeoPlugin pulls the most recent exchange rate between this currency and a user-defined base currency—for example, between the Mexican Peso and the US Dollar. Rates are sourced from financial data partners and updated daily.
Finally, displayed prices are multiplied in real-time by the fetched conversion factor, presenting visitors with instantly familiar values. The entire flow occurs via API with no visible page reloads or disruptions.
This sequence allows GeoPlugin to keep pricing current down to the day while eliminating the need for manual maintenance across country sites.
Flexible integration options
GeoPlugin supports seamless integration across virtually all tech stacks via:
- JSON and JSONP
- XML
- PHP (arrays)
- CSV
- JavaScript
- ASP
Whether you build on WordPress, Shopify, React, Angular, or other platforms, picking the optimal format is a breeze.
The service even offers a hosted AJAX currency converter widget that site visitors can interact with directly. No coding needed – just customize styles and embed via iframe or JavaScript snippet.
Top applications and use cases
GeoPlugin’s currency API shines for any business with an international presence across areas like:
E-commerce
Display accurate, localized pricing across global storefronts while avoiding duplicate sites per country. Capture more revenue abroad by reducing cart abandonment.
Travel and hospitality
Present hotel rates, tour packages, and booking fees in visitors’ currencies and languages. This builds trust and boosts conversions.
Finance and fintech
Enable peer-to-peer money transfers, currency trading, and cross-border payments with automatic rate calculation.
Advertising and affiliate marketing
Geo-target campaigns by visitor location and adjust bid pricing based on currency dynamics in focus countries.
Subscription businesses
Bill monthly plans in users’ native currencies using real-time exchange data while avoiding static conversions.
Global SaaS companies
Tier pricing plans by world regions based on currency strengths, localized incomes, and purchasing power parity.
In addition, GeoPlugin facilitates general site localization, form auto-fill, route mapping, nearby point of interest lookups, and other features through its wider geolocation API.
Reliability and uptime
As a free service under light loads, GeoPlugin does impose a modest limit of 120 requests per minute. However, paid plans lift this restriction to enterprise-grade volumes of around 2 million lookups daily.
Either way, GeoPlugin promises 99.99% uptime with automatic failover across redundant server clusters. This prevents currency conversion from ever going offline. The service even continues functioning during MaxMind database updates.
Reviewers praise GeoPlugin’s stability at high workloads and minimal integration effort compared to building in-house. For most use cases, the free tier should suffice, with enterprise plans available for large-scale apps.
Compliance and attribution
As an open data project, GeoPlugin publishes under a Creative Commons license requiring attribution. If displaying converted prices publicly, you must visibly credit “Currency Conversion by GeoPlugin”.
Failure to comply risks legal action given CC’s viral copyleft terms. However, actual integration code remains proprietary as long as attribution stays intact. There are no other associated costs or fees.
For privacy compliance, all requests use secure HTTPS encryption with no visitor data ever stored. As visitors browse pages, pricing converts seamlessly without exposing IP details.
Get started today
At over a decade old, GeoPlugin is a mature, reliable service to deploy real-time currency conversion quickly and legally. It’s a combination of:
- Location detection.
- Dynamic exchange rates.
- Multi-language support across all major currencies.
- Flexible integration options.
- High uptime and scalability.
…makes rolling out native pricing straightforward for developers and businesses worldwide.
Sign up through the GeoPlugin website to obtain production API keys along with code snippets, demo requests, and documentation to accelerate integration. Additional geolocation data beyond currencies is also available.
So, whether you’re a startup launching globally or a Fortune 500 company optimizing international checkout, leveraging GeoPlugin’s real-time currency conversion API keeps your business competitive in our ever-more connected world economy.