Avoiding The Conversion Trap: A Guide to Optimised Cross-Border Payments for Ecommerce Agencies

As an eComm agency, clients look to you to advise them on how to scale and optimise their businesses as they expand. Often, that means launching to new markets, which brings its own challenges of collecting local currencies, offering localised payment methods and, most importantly, doing so as cost-effectively and time efficiently as possible.

At best, eComm stores see the added fees tagged onto cross-border transactions as part and parcel of accessing customers and suppliers overseas. At worst, they’re unaware they’re being forced to make unnecessary conversions, which erode their profit margins.

The problem eComm agencies are facing…

It’s exciting when your clients start buying and selling inventory overseas — it means growth for them and a new headache for you. That’s because they could be paying over the odds for FX rates, ultimately undermining any hard-won customer conversion and slicing down the profit margin. You can’t treat cross-border payments the same way you treat domestic payments, after all.

Suddenly, you’re accepting and sending money in various currencies; you’re probably using household names to manage your international transactions because they’re market leaders and integrated with the eComm platforms. But you’re getting charged unnecessarily for holding money, accepting and sending payments cross-border. You’re trapped in a conversion nightmare.

As an Ecommerce agency leader, if your clients deal with customers and/or suppliers outside the UK, Thomas Djukic, Channel Partnership Associate Director at Airwallex has some good news for you. Tune in to Thomas’ session from our Ecommerce Agency Book Launch event in October 2023.