Disclosure: This is a paid review. Saying that, all our reviews are honest. It wouldn’t be fair otherwise.

Dynamic Converter is a conversion service for displaying dual currencies on a particular website. Quite simply, it aims to take the hassle out of multi-currency e-commerce websites.

Who is it for?

In essence, this is for people who want the simplest solution to automating and displaying dual currencies. From Dynamic Converter’s site, people who want to:

• Boost their international sales by talking to their customers in their currency.
• Transform their web site from domestic to international.
• Stop losing sales by sending their customers away to convert their product prices.
• Reduce customer frustration

Experienced programmers may think it’s a trivial matter to convert into different currencies within a website. But the problem arises that not only must one convert the currencies, but also have a constantly updating conversion rate. As this is an automated conversion service, the hard work is already done.

How Does It Work?

A snippet of code is placed in the footer of the site, much akin to stats code found in many footers around the web. And the beauty of it is that that is all one has to do. The code does not have to be placed around each of your price fields.

(More detailed instructions are available upon creating an account, but I’ll doubt any readers here would seriously need them.)

What e-commerce sites will it work on?

A full list is provided, but for the non-clicky reader the main players (osCommerce, XCart and ZenCart) are all catered for. In theory, any site regardless of its e-commerce package or server-side programming language could use the service. Dynamic and static sites will be able to make use of the service.

Features

For the curious, examples are provided and the conversion tool appears to welcome styling, meaning it would be able to fit snugly into most websites.

As well as operating as a simple converter, the following noteworthy but not exhaustive features are present depending on the package ordered:

• Tax/VAT calculation: Useful for automating the sales tax.
• Automatic Currency Detection: As it says on the tin, this will detect $s for users in the US, £s for users in the UK etc.

The Cost

For low traffic sites, the service is free. ( <10,000 hits per month. ) The service tops out at US$40 per month with unlimited requests on paid packages.

My Thoughts

So now you’re armed with the information, I’d like to present my points of view on the service.

Initially, I must admit that I was skeptical. I did wonder what use it could be as it was surely easy to convert currencies. But after realising that the service is automated and currency conversions are updated with no effort from the website owner, I changed my mind. I believe that this service could be useful to many e-commerce site owners because of pure simplicity. And the free package is a bonus.

My only concern is that it may seem a little lacking in the standards compliance department (there is some code bloat) but I’m sure this will be improved in due course. Overcoming this will provide a simple, efficient way of globalising a website and thus improving turnover.

If you’ve used this service, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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