Diego

@CLOTHPADSHOP for vendors to be paid in their chosen currency, the commission part is essential (with “commission”, we refer to any money paid to the vendors). Also, the fact that there are two, three or twenty currencies doesn’t make any difference. It’s not that handling only two currencies reduces the amount of work. 🙂

In short, you would need the full integration, to cover your scenario. 🙂

@SAPROTSENKO Indeed. If you take a look at the prototype integration we wrote, you will see that some of the missing elements can be added relatively easily. In fact, the prototype plugin could be used as the base for the actual integration, once the correct “points of intervention” (i.e. where to intercept commission calculation, product pricing, reports, etc) are established.

@SONNETEER that’s correct. Our Aelia Currency Switcher also relatively well with WC Vendors, but there’s always the issue that commissions are calculated by WC Vendors as a percentage of the product price, in whatever currency is was, then they are settled as if they were in base currency (i.e. if the base currency is USD, 10% of 100 EUR/GBP/USD would translate into a commission of “10 USD”).

Adding a currency to a vendor’s profile is the first step, yet the key aspect is to ensure that all the amounts are converted wherever applicable (product prices entered by vendors should be converted when the customer completes and order, and commissions should be converted too, to vendor’s currency).

It’s definitely doable, as I already showed with my proof of concept plugin, but it will have to be tested thoroughly.

@SAPROTSENKO I don’t think that writing your own custom solution would be “incredibly difficult”, but you would have to inspect WC Vendor’s logic, find the correct places where the conversion functions should be called and, possibly, alter the code so that the calls can be made (this depends on WC Vendors providing actions/filters where you need them).
Please keep in mind that the most important aspect of an integration is its maintenance. The reason why we don’t write integrations with plugins from our side is that, if a “target” plugin (in this case, WC Vendors) changes, the integration can stop working, or crash altogether. Keeping an integration running every time a 3rd party plugin is updated can be very expensive (direct experience, dealing with dozens of 3rd party plugins in the past four years).

On the other hand, an integration with our Currency Switcher that is built in the target plugin won’t require as much maintenance. The plugin authors would be free to make any changes they like, when they like. All they would have to do, to keep the Currency Switcher integration running, would be to remember to call the filter for the conversion functions. The filter won’t change in the future, thus making the integration almost “write and forget”.

If you would like to see the proof of concept plugin (which, I have to clarify, is a basic draft), you can find it here: https://github.com/aelia-co/wcvendors-currencyswitcher-integration
You can find some guidelines to develop an integration with our Aelia Currency Switcher here: https://aelia.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/3000048680-3rd-party-plugin-integration-draft and an example of how to call the conversion filters (super simple) here: http://pastebin.com/ASBhBJ0w

Unfortunately, we don’t have that information. We are external to the WC Vendors team, and we don’t know their schedule. I can only say that we will be ready to help with the implementation, when it will start.

@sonneteer that’s exactly the objective, as I wrote in my earlier reply to you: https://www.wcvendors.com/help/topic/currency-switcher/#post-66940

@SONNETEER assigning a currency to a vendor and handling ommissions correctly is precisely one of the purposes of the integration that is being discussed in this thread. If you (see screenshots in one of my earlier replies), they show an example of the Vendor pages, where each vendor can choose the currency in which they would like to be paid. That was mostly a proof of concept, but it shows the direction in which the integration will go, once WC Vendors is ready.

For clarity, please note that above screenshots were taken from an draft plugin, for integration with our Currency Switcher. The Booster plugin will most likely require a slightly different approach. I don’t know much about that plugin (since it’s a competitor to our solutions, we don’t normally work with it).

@FERVOUS You are correct on both accounts:

• Multi-currency support might require some changes in WC Vendors itself, as it’s a matter of having the plugin distinguish between currencies and avoid “mixing apples and oranges”. However, that might not be such a dramatic change, as you will have all the key information you need:
  – Amount
  – Source currency (from the order)
  – Target currency (from vendor’s account)
  The conversion requires one line of code, and you will have the vendor’s balance up to date in no time. Of course, you might want to store extra data, such as the original commission (in order’s currency) and the exchange rate applied, so that you can keep track of where each value came from.
• Indeed, we have been ready to help with the integration for quite a while. As you might have seen, I prepared a proof of concept myself, based on my very limited knowledge of WC Vendors, to illustrate how a multi-currency setup could operate. However, as I explained to your lead developer, our role would be of support, as the integration might require changes in WC Vendors, that we can’t make.

  From our side, “talking” to our plugin is literally a matter of two lines of code (two filter calls, to be precise), and it’s an “implement and forget” integration, as the filters and their behavious won’t change with plugin updates.

If you have any question, please feel free to ask. Thanks. 🙂

@SAPROTSENKO I spoke with one of the developers of WC Vendors in April. He informed me that they were working on WC Vendors Pro 1.4.x and that, once that major release is stable, they will review the integrations, including the multi-currency one.

Please be aware that I’m the author of the Currency Switcher, but I’m not an official spokesperson from WC Vendors. I can only relay the information I received myself. 🙂

@MART456 Thanks for your offer. Most likely, we won’t be able to write the integration ourselves (we are here in the role of supporters), but I reckon that the WC Vendors team might appreciate some help with testing. 🙂

The details still have to be set, but I would expect the integration to set the currency for all existing vendors to shop’s base currency. As indicated in the screenshots, the currency cannot be changed, because that would cause significant mixups. Vendors that already existed before the multi-currency support is added were selling in shop’s base currency, therefore it makes sense that they are “locked” to that currency.

If some vendors wish to start selling in another currency, they can create a separate profile, and the admin can help migrating the products.

@leosimmer what you describe is the reason why we developed the Currency Switcher. Apart from Europe, the US and the UK, who have the three “main” currencies, everybody else has to adapt to clients who most likely use a different currency. In South America alone there is a dozen of them, and it’s important to be able to accommodate the needs of South American customers.

We contacted WC Vendors to see how we can work on this. We don’t have an estimated date yet, we are still in the phase of feasibility study.

@mattunsworthuk Stripe works just fine with multiple currencies. We have been using it on our own site for years. Actually, I can say that practically every payment method will work with our Aelia Currency Switcher, as our plugin doesn’t interfere with the payment process.

Of course, the payment provider must be able to accept the payments in the currency you send to it. 🙂

Since the multi-currency integration won’t change the main flow of WC Vendors, I reckon that everything will work as it does now. Just more flexible. 🙂

Hi again @conscious-crafties. I’m posting the same link I sent you earlier, for the benefit of readers that might not have seen it on the other thread: WC Vendors and multiple currencies – The status so far, and why it might take a while to have such feature implemented.

I hope this will cover the main threads about multi-currency support. If you think that this information would benefit other users, please feel free to share it. Thanks. 🙂

Hi,
Diego here again. Thanks @conscious-crafties for the initiative of promoting multi-currency support for WC Vendors. I feel a bit silly re-posting the same stuff in multiple places, so I thought I will just leave a link, so that interested parties can see the discussion: WC Vendors and multiple currencies – The status so far, and why it might take a while to have such feature implemented.

I’m the lead developer behind the Aelia Currency Switcher, and I’ve been asked by a customer to reply to this thread.

Implementing multi-currency support might indeed require some effort, but keeping the prices up to date would not be one of WC Vendors’ concern. Our solution takes care of everything related to exchange rates, orders and standard reports, and it provides a very simple API that other plugins can use. Most of the work, for WC Vendors, would come from a user experience perspective. At the very minimum, the plugin would have to do the following:

1. Provide an interface for admins and vendors to enter product prices in multiple currencies (e.g. 100 USD, 100 EUR, 100 GBP). This would have to be done both on frontend and backend.
2. When a product is loaded, ensure that the correct price is taken (the USD, the EUR, the GBP one). If that price is empty, then call the currency conversion functions (one line of code) to determine the price from the base one (e.g. calculate the EUR one from the USD one, if USD is a vendor’s currency).

The above is relatively straightforward. Once that is in place, the most important part comes:

3. Keep track of vendors’ commissions, in the currency they want to be paid in. For example:
– Vendor A wants to sell in EUR.
– Vendor B wants to sell in GBP.
– A customer buys one product from A and one from B, and pays in USD.

The commission calculator would have to calculate the correct commission for each product, in USD, convert it to the target currency (EUR or GBP) using the API (still the one line of code mentioned at #2) and credit each merchant accordingly.
This is also straightforward, from a technical perspective. There is just a small caveat for the platform owner: he would be paid in USD by the buyer, yet would have to pay vendors in EUR and GBP. Converting currencies attracts fees, which could be as high as 4%. That would have to be taken into account.

It might be outside the scope of WC Vendors to handle such fees, but it should be possible to add a setting for each vendor, such as “choose the currency in which you want to be paid. If the currency is not <our base currency>, a currency conversion fee of X% will apply“.

4. Produce reports in the correct currency. Very important, but also relatively simple. It’s a matter of not making a sum of all sales, but grouping them by currency (i.e. not calculate a total like 100 USD + 100 EUR + 100 GBP = 300, but keep each total separate).

This is what came to my mind so far, based on my limited knowledge of WC Vendors, but it should give an idea of the work to be done, and why it might take longer than expected to do it. Supporting multiple currencies is a significant paradigm shift, as it’s no longer possible to assume that “everything is apples”. As we all learn in school, mixing oranges with apples is not a good idea. 🙂

This should also make it clearer why a multi-currency plugin, even as flexible as the one we developed, cannot introduce all those features from the outside. WC Vendors is a fairly complex plugins, and its internal logic needs to be designed with multiple currencies in mind. “Injecting” that logic externally is simply not possible.

The good news is that we will be ready to work with the WC Vendors Team, when the time will come, to make their products fully multi-currency. We helped many developers already, we’ll be happy to provide some guidance through the maze of multiple currencies. 🙂