Ugly numbers: rounding your prices after a currency conversion
Converted prices land on figures nobody would ever choose. Round them like a shopkeeper rather than a spreadsheet and keep your tiers legible in every market.
You convert your prices, paste them into the dashboard, and look at what you have made: 63.74, 15.61, 11.68. Every one of them is technically correct and none of them is a price. Real shops do not sell things for 63.74. The exchange rate gave you an accurate answer to a question about arithmetic, and you asked it a question about retail.
Why the spreadsheet answer is the wrong answer
Conversion treats a price as a measurement. It is not one. A price is a signal about what kind of thing you are selling and who it is for. 65 says considered. 63.74 says converted from something else, and it says it loudly, because the only reason a number has that shape is that a machine produced it.
There is a second problem underneath the aesthetic one. Convert a whole catalogue at a single rate and every relationship between your products survives to two decimal places, which sounds good and is not. Your 12 download and 49 course were probably not four times apart because four was meaningful. They were apart because one felt like an impulse and the other felt like a decision. Converted precisely, the ladder keeps a ratio it never needed and loses the legibility it did.
The genuinely hard part is that there is no formula. Rounding well is a judgement about what a number looks like in the market you are entering, and some markets round to five, some to ten, some to a hundred because the unit is small. If you have never sold into that market, you are guessing, and the honest move is to guess deliberately and then let the per-product analytics tell you what happened. That is what the views, buyers and revenue figures on the analytics page are for.
Two ways to arrive at a foreign price
The comparison here is not between store.fan and anything else. It is between letting a rate decide and deciding yourself, with the shop giving you the evidence either way.
| Letting the exchange rate price it | Pricing it like a shopkeeper |
|---|---|
| 63.74, 15.61, 11.68 on the storefront | 65, 15, 12 on the storefront |
| Prices drift every time you refresh the rate | One decision that stands for a year |
| Tiers keep an accidental ratio nobody reads | Tiers keep clear gaps a buyer can see at a glance |
| Delivery fee converted to 4.83 | Delivery fee named at 5, stated before payment |
| A 10-off code becomes worth an odd amount | The code is re-cut to a round figure, or switched to a percentage |
| No idea whether the number worked | Views and buyers per product show whether the new price converts |
How to round, in practice
This takes about twenty minutes for a full catalogue, and most of it is looking rather than calculating.
- 1Convert everything at today's rate and write the raw figures in a column. Do not put them into the dashboard yet.
- 2Round each one to a shape you would see on a shelf in that market: to the nearest 5 for small items, the nearest 10 above about 50, and to a whole hundred for anything premium.
- 3Round your entry-level product down and your premium product up if you have to choose. Cheap things should look easy and expensive things should look definite.
- 4Read the ladder as a stranger would. If two tiers now sit within a few units of each other, one of them has lost its job and needs moving.
- 5Restate every physical delivery fee as a named flat amount. It is shown before payment, so it is part of the price the buyer judges you on.
- 6Re-cut fixed-amount discount codes, or replace them with percentages so they survive the next conversion untouched.
- 7Enter the final figures into each product in the dashboard, then look at the storefront on a phone. Odd numbers are much more obvious in a list than in a spreadsheet.
A worked catalogue
A creator with a 9 template pack, a 39 workbook, a 149 course and a 15 monthly membership converts into a market where the rate produces 11.42, 49.51, 189.19 and 19.04. Left alone, that catalogue looks like a spreadsheet exported onto a shop front.
Rounded like a shopkeeper it becomes 10, 50, 190 and 19. The template pack rounds down to stay an impulse. The workbook lands on 50, which is a shape everyone recognises. The course goes to 190 rather than 200, because 200 is a psychological wall and 190 is not. The membership keeps a charm ending because a recurring price is compared against other subscriptions, which are almost all priced that way. Nothing here is a rule. It is a set of small judgements, and the buyers-per-view figure on each product will tell you within a month or two which of them you got wrong.
Price a product properly, in the currency your buyers actually hold, on a page that costs nothing.
Set your pricesThe mistake most people make
The common error is re-converting. A creator sets 65, the rate moves, and three weeks later they change it to 62 because the spreadsheet says so. Do that twice and your audience learns that your prices are weather. Set them, publish them, and treat the rate as something that affects your margin rather than your shop front. The other error is rounding everything the same way. A 9 product and a 900 product do not obey the same instincts, and a catalogue rounded uniformly to the nearest ten will make your cheapest thing look expensive and your dearest thing look approximate. If you want the underlying argument about endings, the charm versus round pricing piece covers it, and the features overview shows which product types you can apply it to.
Down on entry-level products where the job is to remove friction, up on premium products where the job is to signal seriousness. If you cannot decide, round to the shape that looks most like a chosen number rather than a calculated one.
No, and most creators should not try. Pick the currency your audience mostly holds, price it well there, and let other buyers pay in it. Complexity in a price list costs more than it earns.
Round it like everything else. You name a flat delivery fee, the buyer sees it before payment, and it survives discount codes, so an odd figure there is as visible as an odd product price.
No platform fee, on any plan. What the buyer sees is what they pay, with card processing handled in your own Stripe account. That is the whole reason a rounded price stays rounded at checkout.
Conversion is a tool for finding the neighbourhood. Choosing the actual number is still your job, and it is the part that a buyer notices. Round it like someone who has stood behind a counter, then leave it alone long enough to find out whether it worked.
Try a full catalogue with rounded prices and see how the ladder reads on a phone.
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