As you expand internationally, you’ll want to look at supporting currencies and payment methods that are relevant to the regions you are targeting. While this may not be an immediate concern when you are primarily operating in your home market, there are things you can do to future proof your service to easily enable this later on.
Use A Payment Processor That Operates Internationally
The first and most important thing you can do is to use a payment processor that operates internationally, and that supports a variety of currencies and payment methods.
Stripe in particular stands out in this regard. They support the currencies and payment methods in the regions that are most likely to matter to you as you expand.
By doing so, adding currencies and payment methods largely becomes a matter of making minor changes to the API calls your app makes to process payments.
An intermediate step that many companies take before settling transactions in foreign currencies, which involves more complex accounting systems, is to display prices in local currencies, but convert and settle in USD (or whichever currency is used by the company). This is low effort and involves minor changes to pricing tables and payment service API calls.
Make Pricing Configurable By Region or Currency
Just as you shouldn’t hard code English copy in your app, you shouldn’t hard code pricing. Move this into a database or configuration file such as the example below.
{ "USD.Basic" : 4.99, "USD.Pro" : 9.99, "EUR.Basic" : 5.99, "EUR.Pro" : 10.99}
This will make it easy for you to configure pricing by region. For example, users in Latin America generally expect lower pricing for SaaS products. You’ll often see significantly better conversion and lower churn if you give users in the region an effective 30% discount compared to US pricing. You’ll need to add some additional regional logic so that only users in Mexico, can for example, get discounted pricing in pesos. In some markets, you may also need to account for taxes that are applied to foreign services, another reason to support regional pricing.
A Word About Payment Methods
Depending on where you are seeing international demand, you may need to support other payment methods besides major credit cards. These can include direct bank transfer (ACH or similar), wire transfer, Venmo, mobile payments and country specific services. Operators like Stripe generally support most of these, where as country specific processors may not support methods used outside of their main territory. Examples of country specific payment methods include:
- Brazil : Pix
- China : WeChat and Alipay
- India : UPI
- Netherlands : IDEAL
Taxes and VAT
Most US based SaaS services are able to avoid this because their product does not have a physical nexus in country. However, once you grow to a point and once you start opening regional offices, you will probably have to deal with this.
At Lyft, to operate in Canada, we had to set up a new business entity, transact in Canadian dollars, and also collect VAT tax on fares. Building out this system involved as much work as refactoring for multi-language support.
Companies based in Europe have to deal with this from day one, while US companies have a tendency to defer dealing with this, which can be expensive when tax authorities come around expecting their share of proceeds.
I am not a tax expert, so my main advice is to talk to a foreign tax expert to get a risk assessment and list of the issues you need to be aware of.
Beware GDPR
GDPR is another example of regulatory compliance (and risk) that companies expanding internationally need to be aware of. GDPR is especially noteworthy because it applies to any companies that serve customers in the EU, regardless of whether you have a physical presence there. GDPR compliance is well covered elsewhere because so many companies are affected by it, but I am noting this as something you need to be aware of if you aren’t already.
Related Reading
Which Languages Should We Target – a practical, data driven methodology for ranking and targeting languages and regions.
Global Ready Coding – a short list of low cost and no cost design and coding practices EPD teams should follow to build global ready products and avoid tech debt that will slow localization initiatives down.
Choosing A Translation Management System – practical advice on criteria to consider when choosing a translation management system, written from an architect’s perspective, no vendor fluff.
Budgeting For Localization – practical, high-level advice on budgeting for localization, both for translation and product/engineering work.