Selling online in multiple currencies
Are you using Thrivecart to sell internationally? This might be useful!
I was delighted when I found out that Thrivecart has an Enhanced Integration with Stripe that would enable Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm. When it didn’t work when I tested it, I started asking the customer services at Stripe, Klarna and Thrivecart. It took me a few weeks to find out why it wasn’t working, so let me share it to save you the trouble!
Some background: I sell online courses (digital product, nothing physical is sent). I live in Sweden, but this is a very tiny country and most of my students don’t live here, so my courses are set up in US Dollars. I have used sales pages from Thinkific, Kajabi, Samcart, Systeme.io and now Thrivecart. Students can pay using PayPal and card (enabled by Stripe). Just so we’re on the same page…
I upgraded to Stripe Enhanced and PayPal Enhanced in Thrivecart… and three things went wrong.
My affiliate program disconnected. It turns out I had to reactivate it for PayPal Enhanced. (Pretty easy to solve)
My 100% off coupon stopped working in Thrivecart. But a kind person in a group told me that “100% off coupons in Thrivecart malfunctioning is a known bug of the Stripe Enhanced integration”. I was super grateful to know about that, since I had been browsing Google after “100% off coupon in Thrivecart error” and “applying a 100% off coupon in Thrivecart” with no avail…
In my preview of the sales page, Klarna wasn’t showing.
Why would this Klarna thing be important?
Klarna offers a “buy now, pay later” option so you can take the “pay in full” option of the course and decide if you pay it back after 30 days, or fractionate it as you please. It’s a powerful feature to enable your students to actually purchase the course.
Depending on the country, Klarna would not be available, but then you might have access to similar services from Affirm, Afterpay or even PayPal.
So I emailed Klarna’s customer service, that directed me to the merchant services, who told me that I needed to talk to Stripe.
Stripe gave me a lot of coding descriptions, only to finally confirm that activation from my side was ok, and it was Thrivecart who needed to implement it. Then they told me (erroneously) that because I lived in Sweden, I could not offer those services to customers in other countries. But that was wrong!
At Thrivecart, after several emails back and forth, they told me that Klarna based their service on the currency - that gave me the clue I needed. They thought that because I lived in Sweden, it would only work if my courses were set in Swedish crowns, but that wasn’t quite true.
So I did a little experiment, and I seem to have found the solution.
Klarna, or Affirm, or Afterpay, or PayPal (pay later) will appear on the page if, and only if the currency of the course is the same as the currency in the country of the student’s residence.
Solution:
Clone the sales page or cart page and create different versions, each with the different currencies of your countries.
In my testing, the page set to dollars does show Affirm and Afterpay for US residents.
The page set to GBP (pounds) does show Klarna to UK residents.
The page set to SEK does show Klarna to Sweden residents.
The page set to EUR does show Klarna in the European countries where Klarna provides their services.
Klarna currently supports these currencies: AUD, CAD, CHF, CZK, EUR, GBP, DKK, NOK, NZD, PLN, SEK, USD
Affirm is available only in US and US territories.
Afterpay is available in Australia, Canada, France, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, United Kingdom, United States, for the currencies AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, NZD, USD.
Stripe currently offers automatic or nearly automatic integration with Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay and several local payment platforms.
I hope this is useful as reference if you are experiencing the same struggle!
Stay tuned for future tech updates! An upcoming post comments Keap’s landing pages and how I could fix that problem.
ps. If you’re not currently a Thrivecart user, I warmly recommend it! Feel free to check out Thrivecart, this is my affiliate link (it will grant me a commission with no added cost to you), I’ll be happy to gift you some templates and/or answer questions, if you use my link!
