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In case someone from Polypane drops by: Your pricing page breaks completely when accessing it from Argentina where prices are "larger" (ej. "ARS 1,037.20" for

In case someone from Polypane drops by: Your pricing page breaks completely when accessing it from Argentina where prices are "larger" (ej. "ARS 1,037.20" for the Individual plan). Worse, I see no way to change the currency. You shouldn't assume that because I accessed from Argentina the price in Argentine Pesos is helpful for me (it isn't). You should provide a way to change the currency (normally people put it in the footer) or not try to match currency with visitors based solely on the geolocation of their IP address.

MrDresden 5y ago
This. I rarely speak the language of the country I may be in atm. I rarely use the currency of the country I may be in atm. Please, do not try to be smart about these things.
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  > Please, do not try to be smart about these things. There must be some sort of sales benefit to it, otherwise websites wouldn't be doing it. I'm guessing the main advantage is when it gets the currency right, it's easier to buy the product.
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    Not true. I've made i8n features like that in the past for companies where they thought it would be nice and did not put any research, before or after launch, into whether there was any benefit whatsoever. "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." -- Dr. Ian Malcolm.
    - tentacleuno 5y ago
      > Not true. I've made i8n features like that in the past for companies where they thought it would be nice and did not put any research, before or after launch, into whether there was any benefit whatsoever. That makes sense in a way. Managers tend to implement features nonsensically, as Hacker News constantly reminds me :-) What would be the best compromise in your opinion, then: doing this magic automatically and giving the user an option, asking them up-front, etc. ...?
      - kingcharles 5y ago
        Don't do i8n unless you can afford to pay/hire people who know the cultures that you are adding. You'll hit all sorts of weirdness. And don't argue with the weirdness. I had to translate a site into dozens of languages. Our German staff member translated the text. She would keep writing "e-mail" as "eMail" and I would change it back without her knowledge. Just recently I realized that the capitalization is a German quirk and is expected - it wasn't just a quirk of the translator. I feel bad for "fixing" her work now, simply because I didn't understand.
  - laurent123456 5y ago
    Stripe recommends setting the currency based on the detected country, as that apparently increases conversion.
    - easton 5y ago
      Speaking anecdotally, it does. Sometimes (not as much in the past couple years with Adafruit) I’ve been shopping for electronics kits on the internet and would usually bounce when the prices weren’t in USD. Occasionally I’d see the magic switch currency button, but usually it’s 10px wide somewhere I don’t see it.
- nnf 5y ago
  As long as there’s an easy way for the user to choose a different language and currency, it seems defaulting based on location would be correct for the highest percentage of users, unless you have some reason to believe it’s more likely that your audience is, say, English-speaking users who prefer to see prices in USD.
  - brokenkebab 5y ago
    On language you may be right. On currency, it's complicated. In economically unstable countries people generally prefer to count in USD, or EUR, especially if it's something which has to be paid across borders.
  - MrDresden 5y ago
    In the vast amount of cases there is never any (clear or otherwise) option to set the language of the site. This has held true for Google as well as small mom and pops web shops. Larger entities like Google can just send you into redirection hell sometimes if you try to set a language (where you can even find the option). Others decline to show you the content since it is not "available in your part of the world" even though what you were doing was simply setting the language of the webpage, not changing its location in the world (I have been temporarily in the Netherlands now for a few months and this keeps happening on .nl domains!). If the page is a for a SaaS, the pricing structure should allow me to select from all of the options they have. I do not want to be forced to only have prices in DKK, SEK, EURO or US if it is just tied to the location that the page thinks I am coming from. Here I'm obviously excluding cases where the store/saas/service is location specific (i.e shop.se for Sweden for instance).
    - zamadatix 5y ago
      > In the vast amount of cases there is never any (clear or otherwise) option to set the language of the site. Unless manually disabled for privacy reasons (in which case... well yeah) your browser sends a weighted list of your language preferences with the HTTP request, the option on the site should only be an override. > This has held true for Google as well as small mom and pops web shops. Google follows the above language list unless your account or temporary session settings override it. Mom and pop probably don't know how to support more than one language let alone how to implement it well.
- elondaits 5y ago
  The language thing is terrible. I use the English version of Chrome on an English language MacOS, configured English as my preferred language with Spanish as the second option (which are sent to the site)… and of I travel to Germany many internationalized sites decide I want to read in German… or Portuguese in Brazil. Language options and localization are old as time but sites use defaults based on IP addresses.
  - epolanski 5y ago
    Some websites on mobile still display in swiss french for me, because I lived there in 2015. And I have changed 4 smartphones since then, but some websites that I registered or logged from years ago in switzerland still assume I'm living there. Worse of all? I cannot change the currency, and everything is shown in CHF.
otrahuevada 5y ago
I'm in Uruguay and it gave me Euros as currency? I'm not sure what 3rd party they're using for this but it looks like it could use some fine tuning
kadomony 5y ago
Their pricing breaks the entire deal for me. :) Just use the free alternative Responsively.
chrismorgan 5y ago
Presenting such converted prices (without saying “this is an approximation”) also requires that you lock in the price in that currency indefinitely (which is possible, but I’d be surprised), or else you’re lying to your customers about the price. I can’t find any plausible correlation between the prices it’s presenting me (AUD745.40 billed annually for the business plan) and any base currency. The Individual-to-Business ratio suggests 9 and 39 units of currency per month, but which that would be, I don’t know. “Includes VAT” makes the whole thing a mess; European VAT is inapplicable in Australia, though if they do enough business here they should register for GST (and the procedure for skipping that taax is different, too: in Europe the buyer gives the seller their VAT ID and the seller removes the VAT charge, but in Australia the seller charges GST and business clients can claim it back from the Tax Office in their Business Activity Statement). Making this worse, the page source has a JSON-LD block listing an aggregate price range of USD9–49, which I’m pretty sure is just flat-out wrong.

MrDresden 5y ago

This. I rarely speak the language of the country I may be in atm. I rarely use the currency of the country I may be in atm. Please, do not try to be smart about these things.

tentacleuno 5y ago
> Please, do not try to be smart about these things. There must be some sort of sales benefit to it, otherwise websites wouldn't be doing it. I'm guessing the main advantage is when it gets the currency right, it's easier to buy the product.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  Not true. I've made i8n features like that in the past for companies where they thought it would be nice and did not put any research, before or after launch, into whether there was any benefit whatsoever. "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." -- Dr. Ian Malcolm.
  - tentacleuno 5y ago
    > Not true. I've made i8n features like that in the past for companies where they thought it would be nice and did not put any research, before or after launch, into whether there was any benefit whatsoever. That makes sense in a way. Managers tend to implement features nonsensically, as Hacker News constantly reminds me :-) What would be the best compromise in your opinion, then: doing this magic automatically and giving the user an option, asking them up-front, etc. ...?
    - kingcharles 5y ago
      Don't do i8n unless you can afford to pay/hire people who know the cultures that you are adding. You'll hit all sorts of weirdness. And don't argue with the weirdness. I had to translate a site into dozens of languages. Our German staff member translated the text. She would keep writing "e-mail" as "eMail" and I would change it back without her knowledge. Just recently I realized that the capitalization is a German quirk and is expected - it wasn't just a quirk of the translator. I feel bad for "fixing" her work now, simply because I didn't understand.
- laurent123456 5y ago
  Stripe recommends setting the currency based on the detected country, as that apparently increases conversion.
  - easton 5y ago
    Speaking anecdotally, it does. Sometimes (not as much in the past couple years with Adafruit) I’ve been shopping for electronics kits on the internet and would usually bounce when the prices weren’t in USD. Occasionally I’d see the magic switch currency button, but usually it’s 10px wide somewhere I don’t see it.
nnf 5y ago
As long as there’s an easy way for the user to choose a different language and currency, it seems defaulting based on location would be correct for the highest percentage of users, unless you have some reason to believe it’s more likely that your audience is, say, English-speaking users who prefer to see prices in USD.
- brokenkebab 5y ago
  On language you may be right. On currency, it's complicated. In economically unstable countries people generally prefer to count in USD, or EUR, especially if it's something which has to be paid across borders.
- MrDresden 5y ago
  In the vast amount of cases there is never any (clear or otherwise) option to set the language of the site. This has held true for Google as well as small mom and pops web shops. Larger entities like Google can just send you into redirection hell sometimes if you try to set a language (where you can even find the option). Others decline to show you the content since it is not "available in your part of the world" even though what you were doing was simply setting the language of the webpage, not changing its location in the world (I have been temporarily in the Netherlands now for a few months and this keeps happening on .nl domains!). If the page is a for a SaaS, the pricing structure should allow me to select from all of the options they have. I do not want to be forced to only have prices in DKK, SEK, EURO or US if it is just tied to the location that the page thinks I am coming from. Here I'm obviously excluding cases where the store/saas/service is location specific (i.e shop.se for Sweden for instance).
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    > In the vast amount of cases there is never any (clear or otherwise) option to set the language of the site. Unless manually disabled for privacy reasons (in which case... well yeah) your browser sends a weighted list of your language preferences with the HTTP request, the option on the site should only be an override. > This has held true for Google as well as small mom and pops web shops. Google follows the above language list unless your account or temporary session settings override it. Mom and pop probably don't know how to support more than one language let alone how to implement it well.
elondaits 5y ago
The language thing is terrible. I use the English version of Chrome on an English language MacOS, configured English as my preferred language with Spanish as the second option (which are sent to the site)… and of I travel to Germany many internationalized sites decide I want to read in German… or Portuguese in Brazil. Language options and localization are old as time but sites use defaults based on IP addresses.
- epolanski 5y ago
  Some websites on mobile still display in swiss french for me, because I lived there in 2015. And I have changed 4 smartphones since then, but some websites that I registered or logged from years ago in switzerland still assume I'm living there. Worse of all? I cannot change the currency, and everything is shown in CHF.

otrahuevada 5y ago

I'm in Uruguay and it gave me Euros as currency? I'm not sure what 3rd party they're using for this but it looks like it could use some fine tuning

kadomony 5y ago

Their pricing breaks the entire deal for me. :) Just use the free alternative Responsively.

chrismorgan 5y ago

Presenting such converted prices (without saying “this is an approximation”) also requires that you lock in the price in that currency indefinitely (which is possible, but I’d be surprised), or else you’re lying to your customers about the price. I can’t find any plausible correlation between the prices it’s presenting me (AUD745.40 billed annually for the business plan) and any base currency. The Individual-to-Business ratio suggests 9 and 39 units of currency per month, but which that would be, I don’t know. “Includes VAT” makes the whole thing a mess; European VAT is inapplicable in Australia, though if they do enough business here they should register for GST (and the procedure for skipping that taax is different, too: in Europe the buyer gives the seller their VAT ID and the seller removes the VAT charge, but in Australia the seller charges GST and business clients can claim it back from the Tax Office in their Business Activity Statement). Making this worse, the page source has a JSON-LD block listing an aggregate price range of USD9–49, which I’m pretty sure is just flat-out wrong.