Currency Update Question

New to the Update Currency option for ZC but I'm assuming by the huge swings I just witnessed after updating that ZC does not auto update currencies?
If so, is there a way to have ZC auto update every so often?

Thank you,
Stephen

While the answer is yes: there's an addon for a related cron job you could run if your hosting company gives you that sort of control, I beg to ask another question: Why?

What reason does your business have for being exactly up to date to the thousandth of a penny when pricing in alternate currencies?
Is there a particular business reason why you need to update those amounts more frequently than perhaps monthly? A reason why ballpark values aren't good enough?

Not that it would greatly affect my site right now but it could make someone think twice about a purchase if the exchange rate was too high or possibly have me losing my shirt on items if it were really low.
http://minu.me/2tku

Unfortunately the exchange rate these days is just a fluid as the oil and gas market thanks to speculators and unsubstantiated rumors about instability in a particular market or area of the world.
Just an unsustantiated rumor of China unloading all, or a majority of the 843 billion dollars in US T-Bills they hold would cause the dollar to drop, allowing those rumor mongers to make a few bucks.
A substantiated rumor would send the dollar into a free fall.

Yep, maybe I'm over thinking it a bit, but I think updating the currencies every 5 days to a week would be far better than once a month, especially if a savvy consumer knows the exchange rate and your site is off by too much.

My $0.02

Try this

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=430

You just need to set up a cron job to trigger it to work ever once in a while, I set mine for 2am on a sunday,

DrByte:

I beg to ask another question: Why?

What reason does your business have for being exactly up to date to the thousandth of a penny when pricing in alternate currencies?
Is there a particular business reason why you need to update those amounts more frequently than perhaps monthly? A reason why ballpark values aren't good enough?
I hate to say this but a lot of small business owners forget to update these things themselves, no matter how many times you tell them that they should be doing it regularly.

Thanks Nigel, that's exactly what I was hoping for but my first thought was to assume there was a setting in the currency updater script on board ZC.
i soo love this community and the way in which it helps fill a void or a need.

Cheers!

jabbawest:

Not that it would greatly affect my site right now but it could make someone think twice about a purchase if the exchange rate was too high or possibly have me losing my shirt on items if it were really low.

I should add ... even on a weekly basis the exchange rates don't generally vary significantly. Over the long term the change is gradual. Now, if your customers are paying you in gold or oil, then maybe those rates would be more volatile.
But, otherwise, as long as you update the currency rates from time to time, you should be fine.

And ... ONLY offer currencies in your store that are relevant to your customer audience. ie: If you're not generally selling to customers whose primary currency is AUD, then remove AUD from your store.
Don't present excessive amounts of choices to your customers. Not only does it make for more work for you to maintain them, but also customers get confused when offered too many choices. The "keep it simple silly" adage applies here.

I wonder if there is a specific reason for Zen Cart using oanda and xe for the conversion of exchange rates.

These are two of the numerous forex trading companies in the world and, as I have read in various posts, their exchange rates are not the same and probably include some kind of profit margin.

Up to about 18 months ago, there were two major exchange rate feeds providing official, not commercial rates: ECB and Federal Reserve Bank of NY. The latter stopped providing a feed since last April (I think) but can't see any reason why ECB's feed is not used by Zen Cart. As far as I know, it is free for everyone to use, the rates are official and they have no element of profit embedded.

Kuroi have provided an Auto Exchange Rate module fed with ECB rates. As this doesn't seem to be so easy for the uninitiated to st up, why can't Zen Cart:

a) use ECB rather than oanda and xe rates

b) make an auto update possible via the Administration panel

Option a) would provide rates from a trusted source and option b) would keep the rates up-to-date. I was thinking in terms of the user being able to set the auto update to daily, weekly, monthly or anything else at will.

I understand that rates don't fluctuate dramatically every day but they do from time to time. There's no reason to display inaccurate rates if we can avoid it. This might discourage a potential customer or create false expectations. They are only displayed rates and the final conversion by the payment gateway will be different, but the closer the displayed rate is to the final rate, the more credible we shall be.

If there are technical issues to make updates automatic, fine. If xe and oanda are not sponsoring Zen Cart in exchange for using (and indirectly advertising) their sites, why should we not use ECB?

These are all thoughts from reading this thread and the Kuroi's support thread for the addon module. I'm still new to Zen Cart, so there may be other reasons behind the present arrangements, which I don't know. I would however appreciate any reply that would broaden my knowledge.

Cheers and many thanks in advance to everyone.

The existing approach has been used for legacy reasons, good or bad.
That section of Zen Cart v2 has been rewritten to use ECB, so your question "a" has been addressed there. In the meantime, installing kuroi's ECB addon is straightforward.

As for your "b" question on automatic updates, Zen Cart currently doesn't have any built-in cron facility. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that most storeowners wouldn't have a clue how to set up a cron job in their hosting environment. And writing one to fire upon every click to the store would be a huge waste of resources and would certainly create some serious traffic problems and likely get your site banned from the sites that serve rates.

Your points are understood. A merchant transacting in multiple currencies will naturally be interested in spending time in the currencies page much more than merchants who only use a single currency. Presently it's up to each merchant to establish the exchange rate they wish to have applied ... and the correct rate has nothing to do with what ECB is posting ... in fact the actual best rate is whatever your BANK gives you when converting funds. Any other rate is just going to cause you or the customer to lose money. It's up to you to decide which direction you wish to lean.

Thank you for the reply DrByte.

I see your points but I probably didn't express my own point on auto updates very clearly: I wasn't talking about real time rates; this would certainly create huge traffic problems and unnecessary waste of resources.

My idea of auto updates is to get a feed from the rates provider periodically as defined by the storeowner. In view of the traffic involved, this could be restricted by the system to no more than once every day. In theory, if we manually update our rates daily, it shouldn't produce more traffic.

Whether this requires a built-in cron facility or not is beyond my knowledge of the system; I don't even know what a cron job is. As you say, "most storeowners wouldn't have a clue how to set up a cron job in their hosting environment" and this is the reason that Kuroi's addon is not an easy alternative for the average user. I am quite adventurous and will give it a try but whether it will be successful or not remains to be seen. You developers might have or "invent" an easier way, like for example pulling the rates and storing them in a central database or simple Excel file accessible as read-only by storeowners.

Finally, as an ex-banker, I very well understand exchange rate risks involved in multi currency selling. However, as long as the starting point is an accurate reference rate as provided by ECB, the storeowner can compensate for the bank's or payment gateway's exchange rate difference by adjusting the value in Configuration > My Store > Currency Conversion Ratio. I'm glad that Zen Cart v2 will be using the ECB rates. I'm not asking when v2 will be available as the question has been banned in the relative thread on v1.4 (renumbered to v2) but it surprises me that this upgrade is in the road map for over two years.

Thank you again for listening and responding.

Athens Collectibles:

Kuroi have provided an Auto Exchange Rate module fed with ECB rates.

...this doesn't seem to be so easy for the uninitiated to st up
I'm not sure why you think it's hard to set up. But that's a different topic from the philosophy behind updating rates which this present thread is about.

I would suggest having a discussion about it in the "All Other Contributions" section of the forum if you think you need help following the instructions that come with it.
There might already be another thread there for that module, which might give some aid to your questions about it.

I will definitely try this addon. It's the number of posts (219 so far) in the module's support thread that indicates some difficulty, not with the mod itself but with setting up a cron job with the host. But, again, if one doesn't try, nothing can be achieved.

Wow, this thread is exactly where I need to be. I'm a developer for a huge FX company. We want to have realtime rates that pull from our servers, whether screen scrapping or another script is a later question. How do I change the defaults of EX and Oanda to pull from wherever I want? This must be possible since that dude created an ECB plugin. How can I get our rates in there and how do I script it to run realtime instead of a once in awhile cron job? :lamo: