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Smart Coupons for WooCommerce, by StoreApps, now includes native support for the Aelia Currency Switcher

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Smart Coupons, by StoreApps, now with multi-currency support

The list of developers who join our efforts to bring full multi-currency support to WooCommerce has increased. The StoreApps Team, authors of the Smart Coupons plugin, have informed us that they added native support for our Aelia Currency Switcher to their product, starting from version 6.1.0, published on the 2nd of September, 2022.

Here’s an excerpt from the announcement published on the StoreApps website:

StoreApps Logo

Aelia Currency Switcher is quite an efficient and popular WooCommerce multi-currency plugin to display prices and accept payments in multiple currencies.

For store owners who use the Aelia Currency Switcher plugin, here’s a breakthrough update – Smart Coupons, the official WooCommerce coupons extension now integrates with Aelia multi-currency solution.

Your visitors would be able to view product prices, get discounts applied automatically, send and create gift cards/store credit in their own currency. And of course, make a purchase in that same currency.

 

You can find the full announcement here: StoreApps – Smart Coupons and Aelia Currency Switcher Integration. This new integration, paired with our popular multi-currency solution, will greatly simplify the management of multi-currency store credit. It will allow your shop to offer even more flexibility to your customers.

 

If you are looking for a flexible solution for gift cards and coupons, we would recommend to give the StoreApps plugin a try. You can get a copy of the Smart Coupons plugin from the WooCommerce shop: https://woocommerce.com/products/smart-coupons/. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the StoreApps Team: https://www.storeapps.org/support/contact-us/. They will be able to give you all the information you need and explain in detail how you can leverage the multi-currency features introduced in their latest version of their solution.

Of course, if you have any questions for us, e.g. to know more about our Currency Switcher, please feel free to reach out at any time, by using our contact form: https://aelia.co/contact/. Just drop us a line, we are always happy to assist you.

 

The Aelia Team

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WooCommerce Product-Addons by Plugin Republic now includes native support for the Aelia Currency Switcher

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Product-Addons by Plugin Republic, now with multi-currency support

A few days ago we have received excellent news from Gareth Harris, founder of Plugin Republic, which we are happy to share with you. Their popular Product Add-ons plugin now includes native support for our Aelia Currency Switcher. Without further do, here’s the announcement, straight from Gareth:

Plugin Republic Logo

Version 3.9.5 of WooCommerce Product Add-Ons by Plugin Republic now includes full integration with Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce. This means that you can display prices for your add-on fields in different currencies.

The integration is seamless: you don’t need to change any settings, it works straight out of the box. When your users switch between currencies, all the add-on prices will automatically update. Any items that the user has already added to their cart will also update.

You can get a copy of Add-Ons Ultimate from https://pluginrepublic.com/wordpress-plugins/woocommerce-product-add-ons-ultimate/.

We’re excited to see another developer joining the “multi-currency movement”, in an effort to offer owners of WooCommerce shops maximum pricing flexibility. We recommend to give Gareth’s plugin a try, it could be just what you need to manage addons and options for your products. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact him: https://pluginrepublic.com/support/. He will be happy to answer your questions and assist you with the configuration of multi-currency addons on your site.

Of course, if you have any questions for us, you can also reach out, by using our contact form: https://aelia.co/contact/. Just drop us a line, we are always happy to assist you.

 

The Aelia Team

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Advanced Coupons, by Rymera Web, now supports our Aelia Currency Switcher

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Multi-currency offers with Advanced Coupons and Aelia Currency Switcher

Our friend Josh Kohlbach, from the Rymera Web Team, informed us that they released a new version of their Advanced Coupons plugin. This update introduces full compatibility with our multi-currency solution, the Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce.

The challenge with multi-currency coupons

Many of the plugins that handle coupons, or special offers, work with the assumption that the shop will always have one currency. Due to that, they treat all prices as absolute values, and can apply discounts incorrectly in a multi-currency environment. For example:

  • A coupon for 10 USD could reduce the price by an amount of “10”, whether the product price is 100 USD, 90 EUR or 80 GBP. The resulting price would then become 90 USD (correct), 80 EUR (incorrect) and 70 GBP (incorrect).
  • An offer like “buy one, get one for 50 USD” could be interpreted by the coupon plugin as “buy one, get one for 50 USD/EUR/GBP“. The discount in USD would be correct, whereas the others would be wrong.
  • An offer like “free shipping when you spend 50 USD or more” could be interpreted by the coupon plugin as “free shipping when you spend 50 USD/EUR/GBP or more“. That would offer free shipping with the correct order amount in USD, and a higher order amount in EUR and GBP.

In the above scenarios, the error stems from the fact that the amounts entered in USD are taken as absolute values, even when the currency changes. Instead, they should be converted to their EUR and GBP counterparts.

The solution

The Advanced Coupons plugin can solve this issue, thanks to its new, native integration with our Aelia Currency Switcher. As soon as you enable it, the plugin will automatically detect our multi-currency solution and perform the conversion of your discounts, automatically. This is transparent and doesn’t require any configuration.

Is really it that easy? As you can see in the video you find below, it’s indeed easy!

What’s the advantages in using the Advanced Coupons plugin?

The Advanced Coupons plugin includes powerful features that allow you to increase your sales. Among the key features:

  • Add products with a coupon. The customer enters a coupon code, and a product is added to the cart automatically.
  • “Buy one, get one free (or discounted)” offers. Allow customers to buy multiple products, at a reduced price.
  • Shipping discounts. Offer a cheaper, or even free, shipping option when a minimum order total is reached.
  • Loyalty programs. This is a very powerful feature, that few other plugins can offer in a multi-currency environment. It allows your customers to accrue points and spend them later on your shop, while calculating the correct amount of points for each currency. For example, if you offer 1 point for every 1 USD spent, a customer who spends 150 EUR will get approximately 167 points (150 EUR to USD = ~167.45 USD = 167 points).

Multi-currency special offers at your fingertips

If you wish to run special offers on your multi-currency site, in conjunction with our Aelia Currency Switcher, the Advanced Coupons plugin is your solution. Install, enable, and you’re ready to go. On top of that, both solutions are backed by a top notch customer service, ready to assist you with any question you might have. You can also find the announcement of the integration on the official site of the coupons plugin: Multi Currency Aware Coupons With Currency Switcher for WooCommerce.

If you have any questions about the Advanced Coupons plugin and its multi-currency integration, please feel free to contact the Advanced Coupons Team. They will get back to you in no time. 👍

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!

The Aelia Team

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XAdapter FedEx Shipping now supports the Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce

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Hello, everyone! We would like to thank all the people who reached to us, to check how we were doing after being snowed in by the “Beast from the East”, as they called it here in Ireland. We got quite a bit of snow, which is a rare occurrence on this green island. Getting out of our homes was an interesting challenge!

Ireland - Four brave soldiers on the snow

Four brave soldiers crossing the mountain pass of Caradhras.

Now the situation is (almost) back to normal, and it’s time to kick off the week with a great news. The XAdapter Team informed us that they have been working to add native support for our WooCommerce Currency Switcher to their plugins. This follows the great result achieved with their DHL Shipping plugin and it’s a step in the right direction, to increase the presence of native multi-currency support in the WooCommerce market.

The next XAdapter product that supports our Currency Switcher is their FedEx Shipping plugin. We publish below the release note that the XAdapter team sent us:

From XAdapter. Received on the 27 February 2018.

Good News to all who ship international via FedEx in WooCommerce. XAdapter’s FedEx shipping plugin is now compatible with the Aelia Currency Switcher. Thanks to this new integration, now you can easily ship internationally in multiple currencies, and be sure that you will receive accurate shipping costs in all currencies.

Using the FedEx Shipping plugin in a multi-currency environment is as easy as you would expect it to be. All it takes are a few, simple steps, which you can find below:

1. Install and configure the Aelia Currency Switcher. The following document will help you getting your site ready in no time: Aelia Currency Switcher – Getting Started.

2. In WooCommerce > Currency Switcher > Geolocation page, enable the Geolocation option. This setting will automatically select the currency based on visitor’s location.

3. Install the FedEx Shipping plugin. If you are already running it, make sure that you update it to the latest version (4.0.3 or newer).

4. Verify that the FedEx plugin works, by checking that the shipping rates appear on the cart and checkout page.

5. You are ready! The FedEx shipping costs will be converted automatically to the active currency.

The XAdapter Team also put together a short video, to show how easy it is to use their FedEx plugin together with our Aelia Currency Switcher. Have a look at it, you can find it below

We would like to thank the XAdapter Team for their efforts in creating effective, simple to use solutions. We also would like to thank them for joining the ever growing list of developers who recognise the importance of native multi-currency support in WooCommerce plugins. Well done!

The Aelia Team

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WooCommerce 2.4 – Dealing with the new price cache

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WooCommerce 2.4 price cache – Pros and cons

If you wrote a WooCommerce plugin that works with product prices, and found out that it returns incorrect results when you process variable products, the cause could be the new price caching logic added in WooCommerce 2.4. This new logic, which is not extensively documented, was introduced to increase performance of sites with complex variable products (i.e. products with 20 variations or more).

To reduce processing and calculations, when WooCommerce retrieves the prices of a variable product , it stores them in a dedicated cache, and returns the stored data from that moment on, until the product is modified. When this happens, none of the hooks associated with product price calculations runs, and your code is will probably not run as it should. For example, if your plugin returns different prices depending on custom criteria, you will notice that this no longer happens, and that you will always see the same prices. Those prices come from the cache.

Two of our plugins were affected by this new caching mechanism: our multi-currency solution, the Currency Switcher, and our Prices by Country plugin. In both cases, we had to find a way to work around the limitation of having static prices shown to the customer, while still trying to keep the performance at a good level. Our plugins are now up to date, as we announced earlier, and we thought of sharing our approach, so that it can benefit other developers.

Solutions

Based on our tests, there are two solutions to this issue. The first is the best compromise between flexibility and performance, while the second can come useful if your code absolutely needs to get “raw”, live data.

1. Change the cache key for the prices, depending on your criteria

This solution allows to keep the price caching in place, while still keeping the data dynamic, choosing the correct one depending on arbitrary criteria. For example, suppose that a variable product should show two different set of prices:

  • Prices for wholesalers
  • Prices for the public

Your criteria, in this case, would be “customer is wholesaler“. You can then use it to ensure that the correct prices are loaded for the product. You can find an example showing how you can do this here: WooCommerce 2.4 – Price cache workaround – Dynamic key.

2. Disable the price cache entirely

This solution is no longer applicable as of WooCommerce 2.5

This solution will always give you access to live product prices, but it will disable price caching entirely. We would recommend not to use it, unless necessary. You can find the code here: WooCommerce 2.4 – Price cache workaround – Disable cache.

Conclusion

The new price caching system was unexpected and, although we understand why it was introduced, it can cause quite a bit of confusion. We hope that our examples will help you getting your product back on track, and add full compatibility with WooCommerce 2.4. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. You can also leave your feedback in the comments section, below.

The Aelia Team