Currency Conversion API

3 | published by Aleksey B. on Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Currency converting is a common task in eCommerce applications, but despite this fact, it is often ignored even by developers of popular shopping carts.

During the development of the UPS shipping module, we found that the UPS Online Tools service always returns shipping rates in a currency of originating country. It means that if your shop is in Canada, but you ship products from a warehouse USA, UPS will return quotes in USD instead of CAD.

We decided to solve the currency converting issue once and forever and developed a graceful and universal currency conversion API. Today many currency conversion services are available on the Web. The base element of the currency conversion API is a converter, which can connect to a specific conversion service. The default converter which will be available out of the box with LemonStand uses the currency rate XML feed provided by European Central Bank. This XML feed contains rates of about 30 currencies.

You can select a currency converter you want to use on the Settings/Currency Converter page. If a selected converter has any configuration parameters, the corresponding controls will be displayed on the Configuration tab. LemonStand takes care of caching the currency rates, minimizing the number of external service calls and thus making the whole system faster. You can choose the cache update interval in the currency conversion parameters form.