Sell with USD and ZAR, from South Africa

If you are an online South African business that would like to sell products online, in multiple currencies, including Rands, this should be helpful.

You will need to sign up and register with at least two payment gateways.

One, an international gateway, for your big global currencies, the other a local SA gateway, for Rands. We use Paypal and Payfast respectively.

Why Paypal? you can link it to an FNB business account. I’m not sure if you can do this with other SA banks, but it works pretty well with FNB, and it’s worth the hassle setting it up.

For Payfast, it was a lot easier to setup and register, so props to Payfast for that.

After this, you can setup a WordPress site with Woocommerce as usual. The trick comes, with getting your site to sell or switch between the two gateways and currencies automatically. For this, you will need to do a few things to your WordPress.

1. Install the Payfast gateway plugin. This is found on the WooCommerce site. It is free, but you have to go through the order process to download it.
2. Make sure Paypal gateway is installed and setup. This is usually completed as default.
3. Install a plugin “WooCommerce Product Price Based on Countries“. This plugin is very good, it’s still beta when this article was written and is free. It uses the geolocation API built inside Woocommerce to switch currencies automatically, based off the users location. I had an issue with the test mode tool, after disabling it, teacup.co.za would not switch back to Rands. We eventually sorted it out by clearing cache, and turning it on and off again and resetting all the settings. So to test this, I suggest using one of the many Proxy Sites online.

That’s all you need as far as software. Once all this is setup you can load multiple currencies values onto your products. Then when a user hits your site, the plugin “WooCommerce Product Price Based on Countries” automatically displays the correct currency value for your products based off the user’s location and the plugins settings.

When “checking out” an order, Woocommerce will only display the gateway options that support the currency switched to by “WooCommerce Product Price Based on Countries”. This allows you to sell in Rands and other currencies automatically. Something I know has been a need for SA online businesses for a while now. I hope this helps.

SIDE NOTE: Paypal does not support selling in Rands, and Payfast does not support selling in anything but Rands. Knowing this, you will need to change your default currency on the Woocommerce settings from Rands back to USD and back again, every time you want to access the two gateway settings. Silly I know.