We have Shopify Markets installed, and currently run two markets, in Hong Kong and Singapore. (Hong Kong was our original home market that we used to install Shopify; and Singapore is an additional market we added using Shopify Markets.)
We’re having massive issues with how Shopify handles customer payments from any additional market (in our case Singapore) outside of our home market (in our case Hong Kong).
Shopify Markets allows us to show prices to Singapore customers in Singapore Dollars (SGD), and also allows customers to checkout using SGD.
BUT, without telling the customer and without an option for the merchant to choose otherwise, Shopify does a Dynamic Currency Conversion behind the scenes, so the money is converted to Hong Kong Dollars (HKD) before it enters the merchant’s payout account.
Many banks (DBS, HSBC…) and credit card companies (Visa, MasterCard…) around the world charge customers an admin fee for using Dynamic Currency Conversion. Which means that our customers are checking their credit card statements and then becoming very angry (and rightly so) that the price that was shown to them at checkout is not what is on their credit card statements, instead it is a few percent higher. It also leads to abandoned carts, because the credit card OTPs that customers are receiving show amounts that are different from what is shown at checkout.
We’ve reached out to Shopify support several times about this, and they are saying it is because each Shopify account can only hold one currency in the payout account, so all other currencies are automatically converted into your home market currency. They say they have no control over what banks charge customers as admin fees.
The whole way Shopify has set up payments for Shopify Markets makes zero sense to us. If customers in every market outside your home market are charged hidden fees by their bank every time they buy on your site, they are going to get angry, ask for refunds, and never come back. It’s such a bad customer experience that destroys any trust.
We are already exploring contingency solutions, such as alternative payment gateways such as Stripe or PayPal. But the way that Shopify locks down the checkout process, and in some cases doesn’t allow alternative payment gateways in markets that have Shopify Payments available, does not make these solutions easy to implement.
We simply don’t understand why Shopify doesn’t allow merchants to accept multiple currencies into a payout account, without automatically converting the currencies first. So that customers aren’t subject to hidden Dynamic Currency Conversion fees that they rightly never expected to pay.
And Dynamic Currency Conversion fees are not a unique fee by Singapore banks either. It is common practice for most banks Globally. It doesn’t make any sense why Shopify would build the Shopify Markets payment system in this way, and not offer merchants an option to turn it off.
