If you are using Klarna Checkout for WooCommerce and want to sell to more countries than where your store is based and offer more currencies than your own, there are a few steps you need to take before you start to sell globally with Klarna Checkout. You should also be aware that additional agreements incur additional costs.
You’re running a webshop and you want to sell to different countries. In this example we say that the store is based in Sweden (which is within the EU), and you have the base currency set to SEK.
You know you want to target a few specific countries, some within the EU and some outside the EU, but also be able to accept orders from other countries than those you are specifically marketing yourself towards.
You want your customers to be able to pay in their own currency to the greatest extent possible.
First of all you need to have an agreement with Klarna for the Core countries you wish to sell to.
A core country is a country where Klarna offers Klarna Credit, local non-risk payment methods and card options.
A core country is only considered a core country if the currency is local for that market as well.
The current offered core countries in combination with their local currencies.
The second thing you need to do is to have Klarna Checkout Global, or KCO Global, activated in your Klarna account. Otherwise customers from other countries than the store base country will see the Bad value: purchase_currency error message instead of the Klarna Checkout iframe in the checkout. To completely avoid the risk of this error you need to have KCO Global activated for each country/currency for which you have an agreement with Klarna.
However, for KCO Global to work you need to look into how your SEK (or your currency) payouts from Klarna are made. If they are made through regular domestic bank transfers you can not have Global Checkout for SEK (or your currency), instead you need the payouts to be foreign bank transfers using your IBAN number.
Please note that there are additional fees when you have a Global Checkout agreement with Klarna and there might be additional fees connected to using IBAN as well. What these fees are you’ll find out by talking to Klarna and your bank.
Now, with KCO Global activated and the agreement in place for the Core countries you wish to sell to, you can now offer Klarna payment methods such as the popular “Buy now, pay later” to these countries. Customers from countries not included in the agreement, from non-core countries, or core countries combined with a non-local currency can make card payments.
In short; customers from your identified markets will have more payment options, but anyone can make a purchase.
For any questions you may have regarding your agreement with Klarna, you can visit the Klarna Merchant Support website.
Earlier we also mentioned that you in this example want your customers to be able to pay in their own currency. For this you will need a multi currency switcher plugin and we recommend the Aelia Currency Switcher for WooCommerce.
Since you are selling worldwide you want your prices to be displayed with or without tax, depending on where the customer is located. In this example you are based within the EU and so other EU residents should see the price including tax and those outside of the EU without tax.
In the WooCommerce Settings > General options you can set which countries you want to sell and ship to. You also have the option to set the Default Customer Address where you can choose the location WooCommerce assume site visitors are in, before they enter it, to calculate tax and shipping.
If you want to sell to multiple countries you need to either use Geolocate or Geolocate (with page caching support).
Geolocate verifies the current location of the customer and calculate taxes accordingly.
Geolocate (with page caching support) is the same as above, but does the geolocation via Ajax. You may notice your website URLs have a ?v=xxxxx appended to them. This is normal to prevent static caching of prices.
After geolocation is enabled, you need to create a MaxMind account and finish configuring the MaxMind Geolocation in the Integration tab in the WooCommerce settings.
There is a more extensive step-by-step guide at the official WooCommerce documentation.
Now that WooCommerce can identify the country where the customer is located and will adjust the currency and price accordingly, this will help avoid the Klarna Checkout error message Bad value: purchase_currency we mentioned earlier.
We’ve already touched upon this and if you’re read this far you should have a basic understanding of how to avoid the Bad value: purchase_currency error message.
But to sum it up, the reason you get this error is because your account with Klarna is not set up to handle different currencies and countries and/or you do not have Klarna Checkout Global activated. The result of this being that Klarna Checkout does not recognize the purchase currency, hence the error.
If you have done these things and you still get the error, you need to look into how your WooCommerce store Geolocates your customers.
Krokedil makes online business easy by offering a range of plugins that extends WooCommerce and connects your store to different eCommerce tools and providers.
