WARNING for 2Checkout users

[holtyboy]

So here's the thing. Yesterday I took out a 2Checkout account and it worked fine with osC except for one major issue. I realised it doesn't properly support foreign currencies.

 

I run a UK based store, aimed 99% at British customers, with GBP as the default currency (actually only currency). Therefore it was a big hangup for me when I realised that once you pass the user over to 2CO he's presented with everything in dollars. For my target market I know that they wouldn't be happy with that.

 

Then I did a fair bit of investigating, and discovered that 2CO does support the capability to work with a different base currency. Actually I think they rolled this functionality out this week as part of a new release of the 2CO interface. I contacted 2CO and they told me that when I signed up yesterday I used the old signup form which therefore gave me an old account. I therefore cancelled the account and re-opened one today using a different sign-up form and got the brand new 2CO account.

 

Now the reason for me posting this here is to let people know that:

• Having now set-up one of the new accounts I discovered that they seemed to have made some changes to the CGI specification... to the point that it no longer works with the 2checkout payment module in osC. Obviously treat this as a warning to existing users as I believe it is the intention of 2CO to migrate current users onto the new platform in the near future. If I can solve the issue below then I will have a go at editing pm2checkout.php to work and will post my changes if I can get it to work.
  
• Having browsed some old threads here I found quite a few people asking about foreign currency support with 2CO, but very little in the way of definitive answers. Just to let you know then that my current findings have shown that the 2CO implementation of this appears far from perfect. It appears that it is converting the total amount passed on the CGI internally into dollars and then back into GBP before displaying it to the customer, but it is clearly doing some rounding or using a different exchange rate in each direction because it is a few pence different to the amount it should be. E.g. I told it I wanted to bill the customer ?35.00 but it displayed ?35.17. I have written to tech support to determine if this is a temporary bug or a more permanent feature. In my mind not a satisfactory solution for foreign payments.
  

cheers... h.