Appmonger Support for Buyer’s Currency

In the last week or so, Google has started rolling out the previously announced “buyer’s currency” functionality for the Android Market. This is good news for end users because it means they no longer have to make foreign currency transactions to buy apps, thus avoiding bank or credit card charges and declined payments. It also gives developers the flexibility to adjust their prices to suit different markets.

Buyer’s currency is not yet available in all countries in which paid apps are available from the Android Market, but more countries will be included in the coming weeks and months. To enable buyer’s currency purchases, Google has had to make changes to Google Checkout so that merchant accounts can receive orders in multiple currencies. This has implications for Appmonger, which until now has assumed that all orders received were in the currency of the merchant account. Appmonger users in the US, UK or another country where buyer’s currency is now live may have noticed some discrepancies in their sales figures in the last few days as orders started coming in in different currencies (thanks to John, Tony and Robin for helping with additional information on this issue). To correct these figures we needed to make Appmonger acquire the price after conversion into the seller’s currency (or at the very least, the exchange rate used to do the conversion). While Google Checkout has this information and is happy to display it on the Checkout website when you view an order’s details, it seems that the APIs provided for integration have yet to catch-up with this recent change. We’ve spent some time investigating and experimenting with the available APIs and have been unable to retrieve the required data. Technical support for Google Checkout is notoriously elusive so we have also been unable to determine when the necessary API updates may be available.

Rather than leave Appmonger users with wildly incorrect sales reports, we had to find another solution. That solution is for Appmonger to do its own currency conversions using third-party exchange rates. While there is the possibility of minor inaccuracies as a result of using exchange rates that are potentially slightly different to Google’s, we feel that this offers the best option for now. We hope that you can live with your reports occasionally being off by a few pence/cents until such time as we are able to release a more permanent solution based on updated APIs from Google.

Version 1.5 of Appmonger incorporates this new interim support for buyer’s currency and is available now from the Android Market. If you are an existing user, when you upgrade you will be prompted to confirm your Google Checkout account currency. Apmonger will make a best efforts attempt to determine what the correct currency should be but you can change this if it is not correct.  Once that’s done (click the back button when everything is correct), Appmonger will convert the prices of any previously received foreign currency orders and subsequent orders will be converted as they are received. The orders list view will show both the original and converted price for individual orders.

If you have any problems with this new functionality, please contact us.