Does the currency converter App work for South Africa stores?

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Topic summary

A South African merchant is seeking alternatives for displaying multiple currencies, as their payment gateway (Peach) doesn’t support this feature. The core issue is that international customers can only view prices in South African Rands, creating a barrier to sales since unfamiliar shoppers are unlikely to manually convert currencies off-site.

Key frustrations:

  • PayPal offers multi-currency but is expensive and difficult to use
  • Shopify provides multi-currency options to North America and Europe but not South Africa, despite charging the same 2% transaction fee
  • Shopify support promised to escalate to their development team but provided no timeline
  • Historical threads from 2021 show similar unresolved promises

Community response:
Other South African merchants confirm experiencing the same problem, with one reporting two months wasted trying to find a solution through Shopify support. The discussion remains unresolved, with participants expressing frustration at the lack of regional support and seeking confirmation whether currency converter apps might work as a workaround.

Summarized with AI on November 1. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Can anyone tell me if the currency converter app works well? We may be forced to use it because our payment gateway which is Peach, does not offer a multiple-currency option. So far, besides PayPal (and they are super expensive and cumbersome to use) none of the Shopify recommended payment options available in South Africa offer multiple currency options.

Shopify needs to make it clear that they do not offer support for South African online stores when it comes to multiple currency options. We sell internationally but our clients can only see product prices listed in South African Rands. Unless the customer is familiar with the value of the rand they will have absolutely no idea of what our prices are unless they go off-site and do a currency conversion, which they are unlikely to bother with which means we lose customers.

Shopify charges us 2% of each sale but does not offer us the multiple currency option (which IS provided to North America and Europe), clearly exploiting the global South.

I have been on Shopify’s help line and have been told that they will get their development team to look into this problem, but could not give me a timeline for feedback. Going through threads from 2021 I see that they have made this promise to others, so it may be a few years until we hear back from them.

2 Likes
2

This is sad but true. I’ve just lost 2 months on this one exercise, having had back and forth communication with Shopify with no solution to this end only to learn through this article that they don’t have a solution.

1 Like
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Shopify is there seriously no solution yet?