Shopping cart euro conversion

[xoggoth]

I want to show an approximate value of an order in Euros on my shopping cart. I could just manually update a rate at regular intervals but as there are so many useful little gadgets around I was wondering if there might be a freeware/cheap link thingy one can embed in a website that I can retrieve in jscript?

Cheers for any ideas.

[Moscow Mule]

http://www.xe.com/ucc/customize.php

?

[xoggoth]

Ta mule, have found a few neat little converters like that to add to website but am ideally looking for something that needs no user input and will just supply me with a multiplier so I can work out a euro cost from pound cost and show on order page.

[Moscow Mule]

Ok. I think you'll end up paying for that sort of thing. I've never seen anywhere that does it for free but then I haven't researched it that thoroughly .

Maybe you could use their (free) email service some how (maybe extracting the rate you need and plugging into your database?).

Looking at it though, you might be breaking some rules if you use the data commercially (http://www.xe.com/cus/)

[MPwannadecentincome]

Originally Posted by xoggoth

I want to show an approximate value of an order in Euros on my shopping cart. I could just manually update a rate at regular intervals but as there are so many useful little gadgets around I was wondering if there might be a freeware/cheap link thingy one can embed in a website that I can retrieve in jscript?

Cheers for any ideas.

Well can you "call" Google - it seems to know the latest exchange rate, e.g. do a search for "100 GBP to EUR", you only have to parse the response.

[DimPrawn]

I use Yahoo to get the exchange rate.

Here's some quick and dirty C# code:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;

namespace DimPrawn.ASP.NET.Support
{
	/// <summary>
	/// Summary description for LookupCurrency.
	/// </summary>
	public class LookupCurrency
	{
		public LookupCurrency()
		{
			
		}

		public decimal GetExchangeRate(string fromCurrencyCode, string toCurrencyCode)
		{
			decimal exchangeRate = 0.0m;

			string url = string.Format(URL, fromCurrencyCode, toCurrencyCode);

			Uri uri = new Uri(url);

			string content = FetchPage(uri);

			Numeric.IsNumber(content, out exchangeRate);

			return exchangeRate;

		}

		private string FetchPage(Uri uri)
		{
			string content = null;

			WebResponse response = null;

			try
			{

				// Create a request for this uri
				WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(uri);

				// First we only want to ge the HEADER to determine the type of resource at this url
				request.Method = "HEAD";

				// Fetch the response
				response = request.GetResponse();

				if ( response is HttpWebResponse )
				{
					_statusCode        = ((HttpWebResponse)response).StatusCode.ToString();
					_statusDescription = ((HttpWebResponse)response).StatusDescription;

					if ( _statusCode.Equals( "OK" ) )
					{
						// read the headers
						WebHeaderCollection headers = response.Headers;

						// get the content type
						string contentType = headers["Content-type"];

						// If HTML, we will read the content
						if (contentType.StartsWith("application/octet-stream"))
						{

							// Fetch full content
							request = WebRequest.Create(uri);

							// Fetch the response
							response = request.GetResponse();

							if ( response is HttpWebResponse )
							{
								_statusCode        = ((HttpWebResponse)response).StatusCode.ToString();
								_statusDescription = ((HttpWebResponse)response).StatusDescription;

								if ( _statusCode.Equals( "OK" ) )
								{
									StreamReader sr = new StreamReader( response.GetResponseStream( ) );

            
									content = sr.ReadToEnd( );
								}
								else
								{
									_errorCount++;
								}
							}
							else
							{
								_errorCount++;
							}

						}

					}
				}


			}
			catch(Exception ex)
			{
				System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
				_errorCount++;
			}
			finally
			{
				if (response != null)
				{
					response.Close();
				}
			}

			return content;
					

		}

		private string _statusCode;
		private string _statusDescription;
		private int _errorCount;

		private const string URL = "http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s={0}{1}=X&f=a&e=.txt";
	}
}

usage:

LookupCurrency currencyRate = new LookupCurrency();

			Decimal exchangeRate = currencyRate.GetExchangeRate("GBP", "EUR");

[PAH]

Isn't a general conversion rate asking for trouble, if it doesn't match what your payment processor conversion rate (+ commission, handling fees etc, etc) is?

Last thing you want is to advertise an example calculation, then the punters get charged a totally different amount. Bound to end in tears.

[TheFaQQer]

Originally Posted by PAH

Isn't a general conversion rate asking for trouble, if it doesn't match what your payment processor conversion rate (+ commission, handling fees etc, etc) is?

Last thing you want is to advertise an example calculation, then the punters get charged a totally different amount. Bound to end in tears.

You just need to caveat it when you display the price in Euros, that this is an indicative cost and may vary from the amount charged by the payment processor. Same as eBay does for their converted currencies.

[NickFitz]

Originally Posted by PAH

Isn't a general conversion rate asking for trouble, if it doesn't match what your payment processor conversion rate (+ commission, handling fees etc, etc) is?

Last thing you want is to advertise an example calculation, then the punters get charged a totally different amount. Bound to end in tears.

That's an excellent point - the exchange rate on the foreign currency markets would have only marginal relevance to the actual rate used in processing payment. I know you originally specified an approximate conversion, but people don't read the words next to the figures, and whinge when the final figure varies.

Does the company that provides payment processing offer some kind of web service that would allow you to get a more accurate approximation? Better still would be if users could select their currency of choice and see all prices presented in that. Though then that price would become binding, I would imagine.

[xoggoth]

Ta for all replies. Code looks good Dim, will try that.

I assumed it wouldn't exactly match value they will be charged when they get into Worldpay where they are presented with a choice of currency and it then shows the appropriate sum, although I had assumed the charges fell on us rather than them so difference would be small. Still, easy enough to check that out.

Couldn't find any facility on Worldpay except processing an email after the order.