Present local currencies

Help improve conversion rates by presenting prices in your customers' local currencies using Checkout.

Prospective customers may abandon the checkout flow when they see a currency different from their local currency. You can use multi-currency Prices to present your customers’ local currency in Checkout, which can help increase conversion.

Checkout automatically localizes prices if you’re using multi-currency Prices, which means that a Checkout Session’s presentment currency may differ from your settlement currency. See the Currency conversions page for more information about how Stripe manages currency conversions.

Create multi-currency Prices

To present currencies in Checkout that correspond to your customers’ location, you can create multi-currency Prices in the API or the Dashboard.

From the Product details page for a product in your Dashboard, click on + Add another price to create a new price. The first currency on your Price will be the default currency. Make sure all your Prices have the same default currency. After selecting the default currency, click on + Add more currencies to add currency options to your Price.

You can search and select from supported currencies. Stripe suggests an exchange rate based on currency values at 12:00 PM EST, but you can pick your own. For currencies that are subject to larger fluctuations, we recommend adding more of a buffer.

After you’re done filling in the details, click Add price to save it.

You can then use the multi-currency Price IDs you created by passing them in to the line items when you create a Checkout Session.

Checkout experience

When a customer loads a Checkout Session, Checkout tries to automatically present the customer’s local currency as determined by their IP address. Checkout automatically presents the local currency if all of the following are true:

The Session’s Prices, Shipping Rates, and Coupons with amount_off all have a currency_option for the relevant currency.
If a Price on the Session has an upsell, the upsell’s Price has the relevant currency_option.
For Sessions using Stripe Tax, the tax_behavior on a Session is specified on the relevant currency_option for all of the Session’s Prices, Shipping Rates, and Coupons with amount_off.
You didn’t specify a currency during Checkout Session creation.

If Checkout can’t localize the currency because the relevant currency_option or tax_behavior is missing, the Session is presented to the customer in the default currency. Therefore, the default currency needs to be the same across all Prices, Shipping Rates, and Coupons with amount_off.

Price localization isn’t available for Checkout Sessions using manual tax rates.

Local payment methods

Checkout only renders the applicable payment methods specified in payment_method_types. For example, when using multi-currency Prices, you can create a Checkout Session with ideal and card even if you create a Session with a Price whose default currency is usd. Checkout only presents iDEAL as a payment method if the Price includes a eur currency option and the customer’s local currency is the euro.

Testing currency presentment

You can use the API to test what your Checkout Sessions look like for customers in different countries.

In the Checkout Session creation method, pass in a customer_email that includes a suffix of the form +location_XX in the local part of the email. XX must be a valid two-letter ISO country code.

Terminal

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
: \
  -d "payment_method_types[0]"=card \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"="{{PRICE_ID}}" \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d mode=payment \
  -d success_url="https://example.com/success" \
  -d cancel_url="https://example.com/cancel" \
  -d customer_email="test+location_FR@email.com"

When you visit the URL for the Session created with this customer_email, the currency you see is the currency a customer will see if they’re in the specified country.

As an alternative to customer_email, you can also create a Customer and specify their email that contains the +location_XX suffix.

When it is possible to present the customer’s local currency in Checkout, the Checkout Session object will be updated. Fields like currency, payment_method_types, amount_total, and others, are going to reflect the change in currency and price.

For Payment Links, you can use the prefilled_email URL parameter to test currency presentment for customers in different countries. Pass in an email address that includes a suffix of the form +location_XX in the local part of the email where XX is a valid two-letter ISO country code.

Specifying a currency

When you use multi-currency Prices in a Session, Checkout automatically handles currency localization for your customers. However, you can always override this behavior by specifying a currency during Checkout Session creation.

Terminal

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc
: \
  -d mode=payment \
  -d "payment_method_types[0]"=card \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"="{{PRICE_ID}}" \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d success_url="https://example.com/success" \
  -d cancel_url="https://example.com/cancel" \
  -d currency="eur"

In the above code snippet, the Checkout Session’s currency is always the euro (eur), regardless of a user’s location.