Stripe says it wants to help merchants show their buyers prices in local currencies.
To that end, the payments company announced Wednesday (Aug. 7) that it is introducing adaptive pricing for businesses in Asia Pacific and Latin America, letting businesses automatically show pricing in local currencies for buyers in more than 150 countries.
“Online shoppers are purchasing more goods internationally, but it’s difficult for them to pay how they want and are often in the dark about how much they’ll be charged,” the company said in a news release provided to PYMNTS.
“And it’s complicated for merchants to show their customers how much they’d be paying in their local currency and with their preferred payment method. For example, to enable some local payment methods for their buyers, merchants must show prices in those buyers’ local currencies.”
Stripe said it has tested the effectiveness of adaptive pricing in the U.S., U.K., Canada and the European Union, and found that it led to an average 17.8% increase in cross-border revenue for businesses. And 90% of customers checked out in their local currency when given the choice.
Offering people more choices when it comes time to pay can help cultivate relationships with consumers, research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found.
According to last year’s “Consumer Inflation Sentiment: The False Appeal of Deal-Chasing Consumers,” 16% of consumers cited the ability to use their preferred payment methods as a factor influencing their decision on where to make their most recent purchase.
“Whatever calculus the user performs to determine the payment methods that they want to use, they want more options across more merchants,” Drew Olson, senior director at Google Pay, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in December.
And that calculus isn’t just happening online. In another 2023 interview, George Hanson, then chief digital officer at Panera Bread, said the fast-casual eatery’s addition of biometric payments was critical to meeting diners’ demand for frictionless transactions.
“We’re leveraging what the guests have told us and what they continue to show us, which is that they’ve increased their digital adoption,” Hanson said. “They expect their phone to be a part of every interaction at every access point. We’re looking at all the areas that traditionally have been offline and adding value to the experience, leveraging our digital capabilities, and the guest is responding very favorably.”
