We've just set up a new business Website Payments Standard merchant account and linked it to our homepage, hence replacing a previous cart that wasn't very client-friendly (too complicated, too many pages to go through, too many options to choose from).
Nonetheless, we sell one DVD in 2 formats (Pal & NTSC) all over the world, and we ship the NTSC option from the U.S. and the Pal option from Europe, which in turn requires 3 different tax options and several more shipping optons. (We are required to apply 19% sales tax on Pal units delivered within the European Community, 9.25% for units delivered within California, and no sales tax on any other destinations, regardless of the source they are delivered from.) Also, our homepage is divided into 4 sub-pages for language purposes (En-Fr-Ge-Sp), and each of them now includes 1-2 buttons, according to the version and/or the shipping destination.
Our Paypal account is California-based, just like our company. I went through the many tedious steps of successfully creating "Buy Now" buttons in the Merchant Services Create Buttons page for the aforementioned purposes, and discovered – oh my! – that I could provide our foreign customers with all purchase, tax and shipping amounts in their own currency (specifically € and £), which is a great plus because the sums are much more appealling than in $US and they don't have to do their math to figure out what they're actually paying. I dod not opt for "Add to Cart" buttons because a purchase of 2 different video standards is unlikely. Our shop pages recommend contact via email for such special orders. Mind you, our shop page clearly states € and £ values that may indeed vary according to currency rates, but I can adapt that weekly or so and if we lose a cent or 2 here and there, we can live with it (since the cart only converts automatically if you leave your button currency in $, but then no longer provides local currencies in the customers' Paypal forms).
The hitch is: The European buttons that I've changed the currency from $ to € and £ to work almost perfectly, except that Paypal refuses to calculate shipping! It dies calculate the tax correctly according to the shipping destination though! I've verified our national and int'l shipping options over and over again, they're fine. The shipping is added just fine to any buttons in which the currency is set to $US. So in the mean time, I've had to set all the European buttons back to $ as well, and lo and behold! the shipping is added just fine.
Is this a Paypal-inherent issue, does it have something to do with the fact that our account is U.S.-based, or am I doing something wrong? I read the full Mutliple Currencies Demo but to no aprticualr avail.
Finally, I cannot stay logged in for more than about a minute, especially if I leave the merchant settings page to verify the results on our homepage. Grrrr....
Thanks for your suggestions. Yes, this is urgent of course, the shops are live... 🙂
Michael
