Please charge me in your currency, not my currency.We did that initially, but you do discover a few downsides fairly quickly.
One is that if you also price in your (the vendor’s) currency, for any sort of recurring subscription or repeat purchase, exchange rates can cause noticeable and possibly surprisingly large changes in what your customers pay from one time to another. Naturally this is viewed favourably by your customer if the rate has moved one way but less so if it went the other.
Another is that not everyone’s cards charge as little as a 1% conversion fee. If you’re charging a typical consumer subscription of say £10 per month from here in the UK, some customers could easily wind up paying several pounds more by the time you add in the percentage and flat fees that some card providers seem to be charging for foreign currency transactions.
And finally, some people have never travelled much abroad and don’t really understand how things like currencies, exchange rates and conversion fees work at all. You’ll get someone who has signed up at £10/month, with the amount and currency clearly displayed at every step of the process, who will then email you to ask why they were charged $14.63 instead of the $10 they agreed to. Sometimes there isn’t much you can do at this point, no matter how much you try to explain that $10 and £10 are not the same, and that their card company has added a hefty surcharge for the conversion, and that this would have been explained in the credit card terms (which they probably never read) and isn’t something you have any control over as the merchant.
It’s a tricky area, because there’s usually nothing in it for a merchant to push a customer who does know what they’re doing and does have good terms into paying via the less favourable currency. On the other hand, if you start to provide explicit options for this sort of thing so each customer can choose for themselves, you risk making your payment process more complicated and losing conversions due to analysis paralysis. As ever, there’s not really a single “right answer” when you’re dealing with customers with very different arrangements on their side that you can’t even detect.