Merchant-Accounts.ca: The Demystifying Payments Blog

When you are selling to a customer that's located in another country you don't need to worry about exchange rates. If your customer is from another country (like a Canadian business selling to a US customer) you can issue the charge as normal. The customers card issuing bank will calculate and assess any exchange rate that is necessary. You will receive the exact amount of money that you expect. David also explains the option of multi-currency processing so that there is no exchange because you actually can choose (if you want) to charge your foreign customers in their local currency.

If you sell to customers outside of your country then you are doing international sales. This type of transaction, where the payment is across borders, incur extra fees from Visa and Mastercard. In this video David explains the criteria that determine if a transaction is cross border or not, and how much those fees are likely to be. (As well as touch on the topic of processing and settlement currencies).

Businesses can save a lot of money by routing their credit card transactions intelligently. This technique is called 'interchange optimization'. If you process a high volume of credit card transactions to customers located in different countries the cost savings can be very significant. In this discussion David explains the concept of interchange optimization and how it works.

You may have noticed a lot of declined transactions when selling to international customers. In this video we explain why international (cross border) e-commerce transactions get declined, and what you can do to minimize it.

If your business transacts across borders, how do you ensure that you've optimized your payments solution? Our CEO David Goodale sets out to demystify the most complex area of payments: multi-currency and cross-border e-commerce payments. This is a detailed exploration of everything to know about multi-currency payment processing.

It's very common for Canadian businesses to sell online in US dollars. However, many Canadian business owners do not realize that it's easy to receive your deposits from credit card sales in USD without having to convert it into Canadian dollars.

Some card issuing banks have a fee that causes problems for online businesses when selling to international customers. We are talking about the extra international transaction fees that some card issuing banks charge to their cardholders. In these cases customers may complain if their credit card was charged more money than they expected.