WordPress E-Commerce Plugins Update to Support Stripe’s Global Expansion of Currencies

Stripe announced that it now supports 139 currencies in an effort to increase patrons’ ability to sell to worldwide audiences. The update allows those using Stripe to charge customers using any of the new currencies. Stripe handles the conversion and transfers funds to its patrons in their home currencies with a 2% fee added on top.

This massive expansion of available currencies is prompting WordPress e-commerce developers to update their Stripe payment processing extensions. The process is not complicated, according to Lew Ayotte, developer of iThemes Exchange. He pushed the updates this morning to their free Stripe gateway. “It was actually pretty easy,” he said. “We modified the add-on to pull the supported currencies from Stripe’s API, which we then use to list as the usable currencies in Exchange. Beforehand it was a manual process.”

Pippin Williamson confirmed that the Easy Digital Downloads Stripe gateway extension is being modified and will also support all 139 currencies.

WordPress e-commerce solutions that support Stripe are not required to add all of the additional currencies, although it is highly encouraged. The conversion rates are calculated in real-time. Stripe representatives claim that “localized pricing increases checkout completion rates by eliminating uncertainty for your customers and letting them avoid conversion fees.”

To start accepting new currencies, there’s nothing that needs to be enabled within the account dashboard – it’s all done via the API. WordPress developers updating Stripe extensions can find examples in the documentation. Stripe’s Account API includes the currencies_supported method for identifying which currencies an account can submit when creating charges.

Although Stripe is becoming an increasingly popular way to manage payment processing, it is still only available for use in a handful of countries. The team is working diligently to expand its services beyond the US and Europe. Hopefully, when that day arrives, the changes required to the software ecosystem surrounding Stripe will be just as easy to implement as the new currencies announced today.