I would like to support this. The dollar-value to a customer in India is probably lower than in the USA.
Most big platforms (Udemy, App Store, Play Store) seem to solve this with a price tier matrix. They maintain a big table of prices per (tier, currency). The tier comes from the product, and the currency comes from ... the user's IP address? (See example matrix [2])
To build this from scratch, I would have to:
* Define a list of tiers, each with a hard-coded USD price.
* Maintain a list of Purchasing Power Parity multipliers for each currency. For example, regularly scrape OECD data.
* To get a tier's price in currency X, multiply by the current PPP.
* Somehow clamp the prices to "appealing" values, so we get e.g. £25 instead of £24.19.
* Ensure we never make a loss after subtracting Stripe fees!
* Detect a user's location. Presumably using IP. Map location to a country, and country to a currency.
* Probably many more things I haven't thought of.
This feels like a generic problem that I shouldn't be re-solving myself. So, questions:
* What libraries/services can I use instead?
* How do you do implement localized pricing?
* Are there complexities that explain why there's not an out-of-the-box solution?
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32118530 [2]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/udemy-images/support/Udemy+Price+Tier+Matrix+-+EN+09-17+Matrix.pdf
Here are the docs, and please let us know if you try it out and have feedback: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/present-local-curr...
Thanks!
Then figure out a line where it's worth discounting. Perhaps 5x lower purchasing power than say, the US. Maybe a third tier if it's 15x difference, though I doubt it's that bad.
If you want you could pull real-time exchange rates and have a button that indicates the conversion for someone who wants to see the "most likely" price (depending on when they actually pay for it).
For example if you sell something for $9.99 just leave it as such, and Stripe will make the conversion and you'll always sell at the same price regardless from where someone is coming from.
That's how I feel about it anyway!
Currently, I only have this set to some of the more scalable options (the plan to get access to all the recorded audios and not the plan where I give an hour of 1-on-1 calls per month), yet it may even work for things with more variable costs, if the minimum price is still sufficient.
So that's what I'm gonna try, because as you mention, the other way seems highly complex and also we customers can sometimes feel annoyed by regional pricing, especially for digital goods. But who knows how it'll work.
There is a VAT MOSS (Mini One Stop Shop) requirement for selling courses in EU AFAIK, see (example only, no idea if contents are accurate):
https://botflo.com/eu-vat-moss-tips-for-online-course-creato...
This (of course it is essentially an ad for the company) quickly explains the possible issues: