Overview

In general, a payment may involve three currencies: customer account currency, payment currency, and merchant account currency. If all these currencies are the same, there is no need for currency conversion; otherwise you need to convert the payment amount between currencies.

Let's say that the customer uses their dollar-denominated card to pay a certain amount in euros to merchant whose account is denominated in pound sterling. The payment amount is consecutively converted from dollars to euros, and then from euros to pounds. The first conversion operation is performed by the issuer or by alternative payment system. The second conversion operation is performed by the ecommpay payment platform.

You can also perform the conversion on your side and send the converted amount in the desired currency in the requests for performing operations.

You can get the information about conversion operations performed by the payment platform from the callbacks with payment results, from Dashboard, or from regular reports sent to email addresses you specify. We recommend that you use this information for reconciliation with ecommpay because issuers and alternative payment systems use the merchant account currency to keep record of the merchant transactions.

It should be also taken into account that the operation amount and the amount actually debited from the customer's account may not be the same since currency exchange rates usually differ on the date when the payment was initiated and the date when the funds were actually debited. For conversion and compensation in such cases, the customer should contact the card issuer or the organization where the account is opened.

To find out which payment methods and in which currencies support conversion, please refer to the description of this method or to the ecommpay account manager.