Price localization

As you may know, price localization is a key factor in global e-commerce. It’s been proven in many studies that people tend to feel more comfortable making a purchase in a familiar local currency. When products are priced in a foreign currency, the rate of shoppers abandoning the cart increases and cuts into sales for the business.

A study done by Profitwell over 50 SaaS companies, found that those who localized prices experienced up to 30% more growth.

Of course, localization is more than setting a price in a local currency, but if you are planning to start, or even maintain, a global e-commerce, you will need to overcome this problem.

But the main reason to update your e-commerce or business system exchange rates is to keep your prices safe, and prevent:

Financial volatility

In recent years, volatility across foreign exchange markets has become the new norm. Macroeconomic, geopolitical and also health events like the Coronavirus pandemic, Brexit, the trade war between China and the US, and more recently, the conflict in Ukraine, all result in increased volatility and currency rate fluctuations.

Any businesses, e-commerce or professional who rely on these ever-fluctuating exchange rates are exposed to multiple accounting errors, financial inaccuracy and losses. Adopting an accurate price localization policy in your e-commerce is essential.

Price localization with foxer

The latest foxer Business version 11 implements a specific solution for this: Data Transformation Services. With DTS you can create groups of custom SQL statements that are automatically triggered after a Bank Publication is updated, so you can get the latest exchange rates injected into your ERP, CRM, B2B or software system.

The Business Edition comes with a local Microsoft Access Data Base example, which is located in the DataTrans folder, but you can connect to any DataBase system like SQL-Server, Oracle or MySQL simply by providing a valid standard ADO connection string.

Implementation

Foxer Data Transformation Packages are organized in three sections.

• The main section is the iterative section, which is executed for every single currency available from the publication source.
• Previous to this, the before iteration section is called in order to clean and avoid repetitive information.
• Finally, the after iteration section is used to maintain logs and summarize information.

Remember that the Business trial free version is limited to one statement per section.

Remote databases

foxer can also update remote databases by exporting the package to a php script, making it very easy for any WordPress or PHP based e-commerce site.

After exporting the PHP script, you must fill in the Database connection parameters and upload and validate the URL.

/********************************************************************************
*
* Foxer DTS php script
* Foxer Version: 11.0.0.1
* DTS Version: 1.0
* Date: 2023.06.01
* Copyright: Tudicor Software © 2023
* 
* Please remember to fill in the database connection parameters defined below
* 
********************************************************************************/

const DTS_HOST = "";
const DTS_USER = "";
const DTS_PWR = "";
const DTS_DB = "";

About security

foxer stores all statements and settings (including user name and password, if provided) encrypted in the local Data Package file.

Remember that the application and core files are digitally signed, and there is a public MD5 code that you can consult, among other security measures that we have adopted.

Scripted versions are even more difficult to modify from the outside because they reside on a private URL, and foxer simply sends data to the script, but of course they are open to internal malpractice.

So, although it’s very unlikely that a hacker or a cracked version of our application could change any SQL statement to harm your database, if you’re concerned about security, there are a few things you can do. And the easiest and safest is to make foxer update an isolated non-critical database and then run a replication job regularly.