Okay, so to some this may sound like a silly question but I don't know the answer and I thought someone here might so here goes...

I recently launched a membership site. Currently we are advertising in the US and beginning to drive traffic to the site.

The question is...what about non-US traffic? Can I take payments through Infusion sales forms with a standard Authorize.net merchant account from non-US countries?

I hate to admit it but I have no idea how money from other countries works, I on't know if they have Visa and Mastercard like I do or if it is something different. I don't know if I have to have a special merchant account to do business on the internet with someone from South Africa or the UK.

So...can anyone out here enlighten me?

I would really appreciate any information someone would like to offer. Even a web address that will give me the answer would be fine. I did a Google search but everything I found was about opening a business overseas, not really about doing business online with people who are overseas.

Thanks

Have a great evening,
Cindy
Phoenix Arizona

Hi Cindy,

In order to process credit cards from other countries you will need to have a merchant account that has multi-currency processing enabled.

If you go to http://www.stradafee.com/Multi-Currency-Merchant-Account.htm you will find an explanation of some of the different options available for doing business with people from other countries.

Just as a note, I don't really know anything about the company stradafee where the link goes to. I just thought the information on their site helpful.

Have a wonderful day!

Cindy,

Just an FYI, according to Infusion support. Infusion does not currently support international characters. What this means is that you can bill your international customers and the contacts will go into Infusion, there are some known issues:

1. If you send a plain text campaign email, contacts with special characters will be translated into the question mark character. For example, Colón will be shown as Col?n in your email.
2. Exports to CSV files will show as Col?n as well.
3. Contacts transferred via the API into Infusion will be imported as Col?n.
4. When searching for customers, the hyperlink will display with Col?n.
5. Strangely enough single plain text emails to international customers will be sent correctly due to the content encoding. Bulk plain text emails are sent with 7bit encoding and single emails are sent using ISO-8859-1 encoding.

I haven't heard anything if Infusion will support International characters in the future. Currently the work around is to filter international characters and replace them with non accented characters. This can be done before the contact is transferred using the API. If you are not using the API, you will have to do this manually.


Thanks,
Greg

Hi Cindy,

I am an "international" user of Infusionsoft. My business is located in The Netherlands.

Are your customers consumers or companies?

From all credit cards, people use MasterCard and Visa the most. AMEX and Diners are "smaller credit cards" in Europe. But in a lot of countries it is still more popular to make money transfers. The banks are trying to set up internet payment systems. But unfortunately, we still do not have something that covers the whole of Europe.

If you are going "international" the one thing to consider is whether you want your customers to pay in their own currency. If you want to use dollars only, then Infusion and Authorize.net will be sufficient, and you do not have to do anything special. Just consider that because of exchange rate fluctuations between the dollar and the other currencies, your international customers would never know exactly they pay. The price in their own currency can go up or down.

If you want your customers to have the possibility to pay in their own currency, you have to realize that Infusion currently only supports the British Pound. And even then, you probably need an extra account with Infusion, because I don't believe they support multi currencies on one account. Also, you need to check with Authorize whether your account supports multiple currencies.

I hope this helps.

Hey Cindy,

I have been selling an ebook in France. I have been using PayPal Payflow Pro and was getting paid in Euros. I had to host my own secure web form because you can't change the language from English to another language with Infusionsoft. Getting paid has not been a problem, but accents in French and other languages are not supported.

-Francis
http://profile.to/franciswolff/

Those of you interested in foreign currency support should check out our customer self-service add-on for Infusionsoft (called CustomerHub).

https://www.infusedsystems.com/products/customerhub

Using this, your customers can view their invoice history, etc in the currency of your choice. We currently support the following currencies:

Dollar
Pound
EURO
Yen
Franc
Lira

Hope this helps!

Kyle

Kyle,

Your add on may support foreign currencies, but Infusion does not. We have an Infusion account with which we can accept only one currency (in our case dollars). Infusion does not offer the possibility to accept payments in Euro's for example (and they only allow one currency per account).

How will your plugin help me to accept payments in other currencies?

I cannot find any pricing information. What will this service cost?

The only thing that will determine what currencies you can accept (bill in) is your merchant account.

Granted, Infusionsoft can only DISPLAY currencies in a few formats on the back end, however they do have integrations with merchant gateways that support billing in other foreign currencies (see list here: http://help.infusionsoft.com/default.asp?id=1801&SID=&Lang=1).


So for all intensive purposes, you could bill in a foreign currency even though the currency symbol may not match in Infusionsoft---and as long as you know this you should be fine.

The real problem though is with customers. They WON'T be okay with currency displaying in a different format that what they paid in---thus the other currency symbols are supported via CustomerHub.

As a matter of clarification, in the case of both Infusionsoft and CustomerHub, 'supporting' different currencies simply refers to displaying the correct symbols, not anything relating billing (which is all done at the merchant gateway level).

We offer a free 30-day trial of CustomerHub, after which the service is $39/month.

Best,

Kyle

Hello all,

we use Optimal Payments as a company- we are in Switzerland and need to bill in CHF.

Although Infusion shows the amounts in USD, the Merchant Account is set to CHF, so the charges happen in CHF, and we can use the recurring features.

The invoices are unusable though, as they are not customizable and show the amount in USD.

Maybe this helps anyone. All the best,

Patrick Leypold