Over the coming months, we plan to develop the ability to configure WCML settings based on the location of your customers. To be sure we are developing useful features, we need to hear from you!
Changing the currency configuration
The first step in this new location-based logic will be the ability to display specific currencies based on a customer’s country.
Until now, shop owners have been able to set which currencies are displayed in each language.
With the next WCML update, you will be able to display currencies according to a customer’s location instead. You will be able to do this in two ways:
Change your settings to show currencies based on a customer’s IP address or billing address, if logged in.
Showing currencies based on customers’ locations
2. Continue to show currencies based on the customer’s language, but specify which currency to use as each language’s default based on a customer’s location.
Choosing default currency based on customers’ locations
We designed this new option to help shop managers who We designed these new options to help shop managers who would like to implement a pricing policy or enforce certain currencies for customers based on their location.
Enforce certain currencies for users based on their location or billing address.
Implement a pricing policy based on location.
For instance, you can decide to set a higher price for someone in the US (paying in USD) rather than for clients in the UK (paying in GBP). You can set it so that customers won’t see the prices in the other country’s currency, even though both customers speak English.
Future plans for country-based features
This is just the first step in being able to customize settings based on a customer’s location. We plan to develop additional features based on the feedback you provide.
Some potential features for development:
Shipment options based on country
Payment options based on country
Product prices based on country
We want to hear from you!
Do you plan to use this new functionality, or will you continue to operate your store based on language? Which upcoming features would be the most useful for your business, and how will you use them? Is there a country-based feature you need that we haven’t mentioned? Let us know in the comments.
How can we make WPML better for you?
Share your thoughts and comments about our plugin, documentation, or videos by booking a Zoom call with Agnes, our Client Advocate. Your feedback matters and helps us improve.
81 Responses to “Which location-based WCML settings will help your business the most?”
Hello,
nice feature, but for me now is more important to improve woocommerce integration, sync product and product variation with Woo api actually is a very bad expirience and it need a lot of workaround for make it work (many products update ecc…)
Hello @matteoB-23,
When you say “Woo api”, do you mean the WooCommerce REST API?
We currently have a partial support for this but we want to extend it in a future version.
Hi @matteoB-23 – I wanted to let you know we released a beta of WCML 4.11 which includes support for the WooCommerce REST API! You can get the beta from your downloads page by selecting the Beta channel from the dropdown in the top right corner of the page. (Please note: since it’s still a beta, we don’t recommend running it on production sites.)
Finally this feature. In which version it will be available?
We are interested in use it in the following way:
– First time visitor visit our website set the currency based on country.
– The visitor has the availability to switch the currency with the currency switcher.
– Next time visitor visit the website:
if time from last visit is less than X time (Maybe with cookie?):
– get the last currency selected
else:
Set again the currency based on country
Hope this feature will work like this. For the moment we have implemented our custom solution but we are facing some problems, so, we’re waiting for this.
regards
Hello @jordiB-24,
The scenario you described is almost what we were thinking about:
1. When the visitor land to the site, WCML will preset the currency based on his location.
2. The visitor has the ability to switch the currency with the ones allowed in his location.
Concerning the visitor currency preference, we currently use the WC session to store it. If I am not mistaken, it will be stored for about 2 days by default.
Thanks for your feedback!
Note: We just released WCML 4.9.0 (2 days ago), so we think WCML 4.10.0 will go out by the end of June or start of July (but this is a rough estimation).
For sure a very good improvment for every woocommerce store.
great!
Are the currency update automatically everyday?
Hi @francesco,
WooCommerce Multilingual already offers a way to automatically update the currency rates, see this documentation.
Great feature!
Just a question, if I have 3 websites in English for EU in €, UK in £ and US in $, with different domains .eu, .uk and .us, how will this feature behave?
Thank you,
Matteo
Hi @angeloL-6,
I believe you mean that you set “languages in different domains” in you WPML URL format and those domains are pointing to the same site.
In that case, you should not have any problem to define currencies either “by language” (legacy mode) or “by country” (new coming up mode).
Hello
That would be a great improvement. With that feature we would be able to be more accurate to target our customers.
Best regards
David
Thanks, David! It’s good to know we’re on the right track.
Hi there,
This is indeed a feature that has been waited for long time.
I’m going to share my current snippet I put in place for my theme and it’s working great with WPML.
Here you go:
Thanks for this great project, it would be indeed fine that the customer would automatically be proposed the ad-hoc currency!
Great! It is very important for us to display the webseite in the language of the customer. And auto-currenccy based on location is a very nice feature.
But this (both) should not get in trouble with Google indexing-bot!
Absolutely need them all. They are essential for any cross border commerce
Thanks, Sergey. Are there any that are more urgent than others for you?
I am not finished my project yet and didnt setup the currency. I need to enter the price in euro but show in turkish lira. So this can be usefull for me.
Great, Bora. We hope it’s useful for you!
Hello,
I would like to see an update for “Woocommerce For Facebook” plugin integration. The Facebook shop uses override files for multilingual products to achieve this which is a manual way. It would be a great feature to sync multilingual woocommerce products with Facebook shop.
Hi @bahadirB,
Could you please create a support ticket for this compatibility issue? It will be easier to discuss this specific issue and maybe we can help you with some workaround.
Hello,
I agrre with matteoB-23. For me the compleation of the REST API is FAR more important than this feature. Far, far more important…
Regards
Thanks for your feedback, Stefan!
Hi @Stefan – I wanted to follow up and let you know we released a beta of WCML 4.11, which includes support for the REST API. You can download it from your downloads page by selecting the Beta channel in the dropdown in the top right corner of the page. (Please note: since it’s still a beta, we don’t recommend running it on production sites.)
This would be a really useful feature. I hope it will work as jordiB-24 suggested. I had to bought custom coding work to get similar features in order to make currency selection based on location work well.
Looking forward to see the WCML solution!
Thanks for your feedback, Nick. We’ll keep everyone updated as it’s implemented!
Yes, Location based Currency display is great. But the Location based Language display is even more obvious problem to be solved. I hope you are planning to do both together in one shot.
There is no sense if my USA visitor opens the site with currency in USD (great) while site copy is presented in French… :O
Hi Marin,
The language is handled in a different way because it does not always depend on the country (think of somebody traveling abroad) and some countries can have several official languages (i.e. Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, …).
In WPML (this is not specific to WCML), you have a way to redirect the user to the right language depending on his browser settings. Please check this post.
Hi! We would really like this feature, we have a client who is complaining about this issue already for a while.
Thanks!
Good to know that this will be valuable to you, Seb.
I do not know of this is out of scope, but in Europe it would be very helpful to be able to show taxes related to the customer’s country not to the country where the shop is located (so called source country tax). For companies they should still be able to provide a VAT number which removes the tax (tax = 0,-).
Thanks for the suggestion @Robert, we’ll take a note!
Fantastic news! We are using external plug-ins for this now, and have issues with bugs from time to time.
The non-existing support for this has made us look for replacements for WooCommerce/WPML. But this could very well be a deal breaker.
For us, this is the ranking:
– Language based on country
– Product prices based on country (fixed pricing)
– Payment options based on country
– Shipment options based on country
I think you’ be able to attract a lot of larger e-coms if you can deliver this to the market.
I also agree with JordiB above: optionally getting to select currency and language (pre-selected) is also really strong. With this you can for sure start competing with other major e-com platforms that have a more built-out multi-language functionality.
Now it’s like guessing for a developer – what plug-ins to use with WPML are needed to make it possible to actually run a larger e-com site? Since few know, most go to other platforms currently where it’s already supported.
All in all, you have a huge opportunity here, make sure to deliver it ASAP 🙂
Thanks so much for your thorough response, Daniel! We appreciate your input.
Hi Daniel,
Concerning the “Language based on country”, please check my comment here.
About “Product prices based on country”, we are now evaluating the possibilities because it could be hard to maintain all product prices if we have both several currencies enabled and and different prices per country for each product.
Thanks!
That’s definitely an interesting feature in a lot of cases. I think I will use location based currency sometimes based on the specific case.
Hi Peter – thanks for your feedback. In which cases could you see yourself using this feature?
Cases with Woocommerce shops operating in different countries. Here it would be nice to show “Swedish kroner” to people shopping and Sweden, and “Danish kroner” to people shopping from Denmark.
Thanks, Peter!
Displaying currencies based on a customer’s location rather than the site’s language is a priority.
This is exactly what we are currently planning to tackle first. Thanks, Pierre!
I agree with @jordiB-24, the user should have the option to choose.
Quick question where will be your conversion based on? I know it might be an estimated rate but it should have a disclaimer that the final rate charged could differ for the actual rate charged.
Hi Fernando,
WCML already offers 2 ways to set the prices in the secondary currencies: manually or automatically with exchange rates. Please check this documentation.
Hey,
Great feature addition, especially if it works via IP. It would be useful if we can set the price per currency, that way we can factor in all the extra costs associated with that currency (shipping, exchange fees, etc.)
Thank you for your feedback, Itai!
Not only that, but it would be also great to control the price for reasons like displaying a number that looks good and to set a price for a country where the people have different income standards.
Feature request:
It would be great to have the possibility, instead of having the users IP be count as a factor but to let the location be a factor that was set in the user profile.
This could support users, that are traveling but need to have the price be factored in their home country.
Also, this could prevent users from getting an IP with TOR where the price is lower and pay the lowered price.
Of course, the user could change his location, but this is a factor that could be set one time during the registration, and then if the user moves to another country they would have to get the admin approval in order to make a change.
Thanks for your comment, Nikolaj. We just implemented the ability to customize flat-rate and free shipping prices per currency with the intention of making it easier to display a number that “looks good.” This was just released as part of WCML 4.9.0.
We are planning on basing the customers’ locations not only based on IP address, but also based on their billing address (if they’re logged in). Would this be a good solution to the situation you mentioned?
Great news! 🙂
But this feature of prices that “looks good” is only applied for shipping costs?
I thought also about the product price.
Regards
Hi Nikolaj – The improvements in WCML 4.9.0 focus on shipping costs. WCML already includes features to be able to adjust prices per currency and round prices that were calculated based on an exchange rate to a better-looking number. Check out the following documentation.
Oh, I missed that fact. 🙂
Thank you for clarifying.
Very useful feature. We offer world wide classes and are working with ‘country pricing’. It would be perfect to set different prices for different country’s.
If this is based on IP, won’t this be influenced by using a VPN?
Thanks @Frank,
We would like to take into consideration the billing address once the user is logged in. This should fulfil your requirements, is that correct?
Thank you for your effort and availability to talk with us. For us is much important to maintain clean the database from unused translated and not traslated strings. Our db is going bigger because of this table _icl_string_pages.
Regarding cookies management maybe interesting a more gdpr approach so it could be integrable with tarteaucitron code to let our visitors decide themeself.
Thank you,
Davide
PetBooking.it
Hi Davide,
The “_icl_string_pages” table is not used anymore since WPML 4.3.0. We are planning to remove it in the next minor version (4.4.0) but we kept it in case we had to roll back for any reason. You can alreay truncate it if you wish.
Concerning cookies in WCML, (if I am not mistaken) we are not using any directly but we use the WC session if we need to store anything.
Excellent initiative!
I would also suggest that the currency switcher would be as customizable as the language switcher:
-either it can be integrated in a menu (especially for responsive mobile menu),
-or it can be displayed on the footer as a horizontal list
-or as dropdwon menu with direction downwards or upwards (very convenient for footers)
-or as a slide-in (very convenient for narrow screens)
And all these options should be available as a SHORTCODE, in case we don’t use preset widget areas.
EXTRA SUGGESTION: make possible the option of COMBINING IN ONE UNIQUE SWITCHER both the language AND the currency. We can choose in the multi-currency options which currency would be displayed with which language (see figures above).
Example: ‘language’ – ‘currency’
–> and we can choose how to display them with the formats %%symbol%%, %%code%% etc
Thanks WPML team! Looking forward for new features!
Thanks for your thorough comment. Are there specific ways you can see this feature helping you? Is there a specific shortcoming you’re currently experiencing that this would solve?
This would be so useful! For my website I want to show specific pages based on the customers location! Please develop these features as they would really help a lot.
Great day to you all.
Hi Anna, thanks for your comment. Are you asking to show specific products based on a customer’s location or entire pages of your website based on their location?
Hi, Allison, thank your for your reply. I want to show entire pages of my website based on the customer’s location.
Hello,
nice feature, but for me now is more important to improve woocommerce integration, sync product and product variation with Woo api actually is a very bad expirience and it need a lot of workaround for make it work (many products update ecc…)
Hello @matteoB-23,
When you say “Woo api”, do you mean the WooCommerce REST API?
We currently have a partial support for this but we want to extend it in a future version.
Hi @matteoB-23 – I wanted to let you know we released a beta of WCML 4.11 which includes support for the WooCommerce REST API! You can get the beta from your downloads page by selecting the Beta channel from the dropdown in the top right corner of the page. (Please note: since it’s still a beta, we don’t recommend running it on production sites.)
Finally this feature. In which version it will be available?
We are interested in use it in the following way:
– First time visitor visit our website set the currency based on country.
– The visitor has the availability to switch the currency with the currency switcher.
– Next time visitor visit the website:
if time from last visit is less than X time (Maybe with cookie?):
– get the last currency selected
else:
Set again the currency based on country
Hope this feature will work like this. For the moment we have implemented our custom solution but we are facing some problems, so, we’re waiting for this.
regards
Hello @jordiB-24,
The scenario you described is almost what we were thinking about:
1. When the visitor land to the site, WCML will preset the currency based on his location.
2. The visitor has the ability to switch the currency with the ones allowed in his location.
Concerning the visitor currency preference, we currently use the WC session to store it. If I am not mistaken, it will be stored for about 2 days by default.
Thanks for your feedback!
Note: We just released WCML 4.9.0 (2 days ago), so we think WCML 4.10.0 will go out by the end of June or start of July (but this is a rough estimation).
For sure a very good improvment for every woocommerce store.
great!
Are the currency update automatically everyday?
Hi @francesco,
WooCommerce Multilingual already offers a way to automatically update the currency rates, see this documentation.
Great feature!
Just a question, if I have 3 websites in English for EU in €, UK in £ and US in $, with different domains .eu, .uk and .us, how will this feature behave?
Thank you,
Matteo
Hi @angeloL-6,
I believe you mean that you set “languages in different domains” in you WPML URL format and those domains are pointing to the same site.
In that case, you should not have any problem to define currencies either “by language” (legacy mode) or “by country” (new coming up mode).
Hello
That would be a great improvement. With that feature we would be able to be more accurate to target our customers.
Best regards
David
Thanks, David! It’s good to know we’re on the right track.
Hi there,
This is indeed a feature that has been waited for long time.
I’m going to share my current snippet I put in place for my theme and it’s working great with WPML.
Here you go:
https://pastebin.com/M9mBULQc
Thank you, Thibault
Thank you for sharing @Thibault 🙂
Thanks for this great project, it would be indeed fine that the customer would automatically be proposed the ad-hoc currency!
Great! It is very important for us to display the webseite in the language of the customer. And auto-currenccy based on location is a very nice feature.
But this (both) should not get in trouble with Google indexing-bot!
Absolutely need them all. They are essential for any cross border commerce
Thanks, Sergey. Are there any that are more urgent than others for you?
I am not finished my project yet and didnt setup the currency. I need to enter the price in euro but show in turkish lira. So this can be usefull for me.
Great, Bora. We hope it’s useful for you!
Hello,
I would like to see an update for “Woocommerce For Facebook” plugin integration. The Facebook shop uses override files for multilingual products to achieve this which is a manual way. It would be a great feature to sync multilingual woocommerce products with Facebook shop.
Hi @bahadirB,
Could you please create a support ticket for this compatibility issue? It will be easier to discuss this specific issue and maybe we can help you with some workaround.
Hello,
I agrre with matteoB-23. For me the compleation of the REST API is FAR more important than this feature. Far, far more important…
Regards
Thanks for your feedback, Stefan!
Hi @Stefan – I wanted to follow up and let you know we released a beta of WCML 4.11, which includes support for the REST API. You can download it from your downloads page by selecting the Beta channel in the dropdown in the top right corner of the page. (Please note: since it’s still a beta, we don’t recommend running it on production sites.)
This would be a really useful feature. I hope it will work as jordiB-24 suggested. I had to bought custom coding work to get similar features in order to make currency selection based on location work well.
Looking forward to see the WCML solution!
Thanks for your feedback, Nick. We’ll keep everyone updated as it’s implemented!
Yes, Location based Currency display is great. But the Location based Language display is even more obvious problem to be solved. I hope you are planning to do both together in one shot.
There is no sense if my USA visitor opens the site with currency in USD (great) while site copy is presented in French… :O
Hi Marin,
The language is handled in a different way because it does not always depend on the country (think of somebody traveling abroad) and some countries can have several official languages (i.e. Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, …).
In WPML (this is not specific to WCML), you have a way to redirect the user to the right language depending on his browser settings. Please check this post.
Hi! We would really like this feature, we have a client who is complaining about this issue already for a while.
Thanks!
Good to know that this will be valuable to you, Seb.
I do not know of this is out of scope, but in Europe it would be very helpful to be able to show taxes related to the customer’s country not to the country where the shop is located (so called source country tax). For companies they should still be able to provide a VAT number which removes the tax (tax = 0,-).
Thanks for the suggestion @Robert, we’ll take a note!
Fantastic news! We are using external plug-ins for this now, and have issues with bugs from time to time.
The non-existing support for this has made us look for replacements for WooCommerce/WPML. But this could very well be a deal breaker.
For us, this is the ranking:
– Language based on country
– Product prices based on country (fixed pricing)
– Payment options based on country
– Shipment options based on country
I think you’ be able to attract a lot of larger e-coms if you can deliver this to the market.
I also agree with JordiB above: optionally getting to select currency and language (pre-selected) is also really strong. With this you can for sure start competing with other major e-com platforms that have a more built-out multi-language functionality.
Now it’s like guessing for a developer – what plug-ins to use with WPML are needed to make it possible to actually run a larger e-com site? Since few know, most go to other platforms currently where it’s already supported.
All in all, you have a huge opportunity here, make sure to deliver it ASAP 🙂
Thanks so much for your thorough response, Daniel! We appreciate your input.
Hi Daniel,
Concerning the “Language based on country”, please check my comment here.
About “Product prices based on country”, we are now evaluating the possibilities because it could be hard to maintain all product prices if we have both several currencies enabled and and different prices per country for each product.
Thanks!
That’s definitely an interesting feature in a lot of cases. I think I will use location based currency sometimes based on the specific case.
Hi Peter – thanks for your feedback. In which cases could you see yourself using this feature?
Cases with Woocommerce shops operating in different countries. Here it would be nice to show “Swedish kroner” to people shopping and Sweden, and “Danish kroner” to people shopping from Denmark.
Thanks, Peter!
Displaying currencies based on a customer’s location rather than the site’s language is a priority.
This is exactly what we are currently planning to tackle first. Thanks, Pierre!
I agree with @jordiB-24, the user should have the option to choose.
Quick question where will be your conversion based on? I know it might be an estimated rate but it should have a disclaimer that the final rate charged could differ for the actual rate charged.
Hi Fernando,
WCML already offers 2 ways to set the prices in the secondary currencies: manually or automatically with exchange rates. Please check this documentation.
Hey,
Great feature addition, especially if it works via IP. It would be useful if we can set the price per currency, that way we can factor in all the extra costs associated with that currency (shipping, exchange fees, etc.)
Thank you for your feedback, Itai!
Not only that, but it would be also great to control the price for reasons like displaying a number that looks good and to set a price for a country where the people have different income standards.
Feature request:
It would be great to have the possibility, instead of having the users IP be count as a factor but to let the location be a factor that was set in the user profile.
This could support users, that are traveling but need to have the price be factored in their home country.
Also, this could prevent users from getting an IP with TOR where the price is lower and pay the lowered price.
Of course, the user could change his location, but this is a factor that could be set one time during the registration, and then if the user moves to another country they would have to get the admin approval in order to make a change.
Thanks for your comment, Nikolaj. We just implemented the ability to customize flat-rate and free shipping prices per currency with the intention of making it easier to display a number that “looks good.” This was just released as part of WCML 4.9.0.
We are planning on basing the customers’ locations not only based on IP address, but also based on their billing address (if they’re logged in). Would this be a good solution to the situation you mentioned?
Great news! 🙂
But this feature of prices that “looks good” is only applied for shipping costs?
I thought also about the product price.
Regards
Hi Nikolaj – The improvements in WCML 4.9.0 focus on shipping costs. WCML already includes features to be able to adjust prices per currency and round prices that were calculated based on an exchange rate to a better-looking number. Check out the following documentation.
Oh, I missed that fact. 🙂
Thank you for clarifying.
Very useful feature. We offer world wide classes and are working with ‘country pricing’. It would be perfect to set different prices for different country’s.
If this is based on IP, won’t this be influenced by using a VPN?
Thanks @Frank,
We would like to take into consideration the billing address once the user is logged in. This should fulfil your requirements, is that correct?
Thank you for your effort and availability to talk with us. For us is much important to maintain clean the database from unused translated and not traslated strings. Our db is going bigger because of this table _icl_string_pages.
Regarding cookies management maybe interesting a more gdpr approach so it could be integrable with tarteaucitron code to let our visitors decide themeself.
Thank you,
Davide
PetBooking.it
Hi Davide,
The “_icl_string_pages” table is not used anymore since WPML 4.3.0. We are planning to remove it in the next minor version (4.4.0) but we kept it in case we had to roll back for any reason. You can alreay truncate it if you wish.
Concerning cookies in WCML, (if I am not mistaken) we are not using any directly but we use the WC session if we need to store anything.
Excellent initiative!
I would also suggest that the currency switcher would be as customizable as the language switcher:
-either it can be integrated in a menu (especially for responsive mobile menu),
-or it can be displayed on the footer as a horizontal list
-or as dropdwon menu with direction downwards or upwards (very convenient for footers)
-or as a slide-in (very convenient for narrow screens)
And all these options should be available as a SHORTCODE, in case we don’t use preset widget areas.
EXTRA SUGGESTION: make possible the option of COMBINING IN ONE UNIQUE SWITCHER both the language AND the currency. We can choose in the multi-currency options which currency would be displayed with which language (see figures above).
Example: ‘language’ – ‘currency’
–> and we can choose how to display them with the formats %%symbol%%, %%code%% etc
Thanks WPML team! Looking forward for new features!
Thanks for your thorough comment. Are there specific ways you can see this feature helping you? Is there a specific shortcoming you’re currently experiencing that this would solve?
This would be so useful! For my website I want to show specific pages based on the customers location! Please develop these features as they would really help a lot.
Great day to you all.
Hi Anna, thanks for your comment. Are you asking to show specific products based on a customer’s location or entire pages of your website based on their location?
Hi, Allison, thank your for your reply. I want to show entire pages of my website based on the customer’s location.