Pick one currency to think in

If you sell to buyers in more than one country, you need exactly one currency that your rate card is actually denominated in, and everything else is a derived figure. The failure mode is not a bad exchange rate; it is five independent prices that were each correct on the day they were typed and have drifted apart ever since.

Currencies move a few percent in a quarter and occasionally ten or more in a year. A price you set by hand and never revisited is a price that is now set by whatever the market did while you were not looking.

Choose the base currency by where the money lands

The base is the currency your bank account is in, not the currency most of your buyers use.

This sounds backwards and it is not. Buyer-side currency is a display problem, solved by conversion at the moment of sale. Your-side currency is a solvency problem: it is what your rent, your equipment and your tax bill are denominated in, and it is the only unit in which "is this job worth doing" has an answer.

So pick the account currency, write the rate card in it, and treat every other figure on the page as an output. If you hold accounts in two currencies with meaningful balances in both, pick the one you spend from, and be consistent for at least a year.

Let the platform convert, most of the time

Platforms convert at a rate worse than the interbank mid-market rate, and the margin varies by provider: PayPal's published US fee schedule, for example, sets its currency conversion charge at 4.00%. That is a real cost and it is almost always cheaper than the alternative, which is you maintaining a price list.

The alternative costs are easy to underestimate. Manual per-currency pricing means every rate rise happens five times, every promotional change happens five times, and one of those five will be forgotten. A forgotten price is not off by one percent; after a year it can be off by ten, and it is off in whichever direction the market chose.

Set your own prices when the platform does not convert at all, when it converts at a rate you can see is far off the mid-market rate, or when you are on a corridor with a currency that moves hard. Otherwise take the spread and stop thinking about it. The general mechanics of what happens between a buyer's card and your account are in the piece on cross-border payouts, and the spread discussed here is one of the four deductions the fee post itemises.

Round after converting, never before

Convert your base price, then round the result to a number that looks deliberate in the destination currency. A converted price of 46.83 reads as a machine output. 45 or 49 reads as a price somebody chose, and a buyer's confidence in a seller is affected by whether the seller looks like they made decisions.

Round up more often than down. Rounding down every time is a standing discount of two or three percent that you never decided to give, applied to the buyers you have the least contact with.

There is one exception worth knowing: some currencies have conventional price points that are not the ones your intuition reaches for, and a price that looks odd locally reads as carelessness. If you have a meaningful share of buyers in one country, look at what other sellers there publish before you round.

Review on a schedule, not on a feeling

Put a recurring date in the calendar - quarterly is enough for most currency pairs, monthly if you sell into a currency that has been moving.

At that review, do three things. Check the current mid-market rate against the rate implied by your published prices. Reprice anything that has drifted more than about five percent, since below that the churn costs more than the drift. Note the date and the rate you used, so next quarter's review has something to compare against.

Five percent is a working threshold, not a law. The reason to have a threshold at all is that repricing has a cost in buyer confusion and in your own time, and a rule stops you doing it every time you read a news headline.

This is the same discipline as the annual rate card review, applied more often because the input changes faster. If your records show conversion spread as a line item, tracking take-home by format will surface which of your currencies is quietly the least profitable.

Do not price to compete on a converted number

A buyer comparing you against a local seller is comparing published prices, and yours will sometimes look high for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

Resist adjusting for it. Discounting into a weak currency means taking a real pay cut to win buyers who are, by definition, the most price-sensitive segment available to you. If a whole market is priced below your floor, that is information about which markets you serve, not an instruction to lower your rate - which is the same reasoning as the case against undercutting a crowded category.

The one legitimate exception is a deliberate, documented regional rate for a market you have decided to enter, with a stated reason and a review date. That is a strategy. A price that ended up low because a currency moved is not.

Tax and reporting will want the base currency anyway

Whatever your jurisdiction, revenue is reported in one currency, and it will be your local one. The IRS, for instance, requires amounts on a US return in dollars and generally expects the spot rate on the day you receive or pay the item. This differs by country in the details - which rate you use, and on which date - so check yours rather than assuming.

The practical consequence is that if you are already recording everything in your base currency, the annual reconciliation is arithmetic; if you are not, it is archaeology.

Where measurement conventions themselves are the product you are selling, the precision worth being explicit about is documented on the measurement side, and it is worth being as consistent with your numbers as with your prices. Buyers, for their part, mostly do not notice currency at all until the total surprises them - the buyer-side account of how a commission opens is a useful check on how much of this the other party is thinking about. The automated tools most buyers try first are priced in one currency and converted the same way yours should be, which is visible in the tooling landscape.

For the platform-side specifics of which currencies are supported and how conversion is handled on payout, Rate Cock's rewards and payouts page is the current source, and it changes more often than a general post like this one can track.