An internet merchant account from any of the UK’s Merchant Account Providers will enable you to take common standard card payments such as Visa and Mastercard from any cardholder anywhere in the world. If your account is a Sterling Account (Great British Pound/GBP) the cardholder will be charged in GBP but their card issuer will then exchange this into the local currency at the prevailing rate and apply any exchange fees to the cardholder.

For most UK businesses this provides the simplest way to take business from overseas customers, ensuring they do not loose out from currency fluctuations. Two points to consider about overseas customers are:

1. Fraud – certain countries have higher fraud rates than others. We advise all merchants to put into place safeguards and checkpoints to combat their exposure to Fraud from overseas before accepting international orders. (see fraud andSECGuard ).
2. Economic Pricing – whilst it might be feasible to offer shipping to foreign destinations it may be uneconomic to do so. Costs of shipping and insurance cover might make the end cost of your products uneconomic with locally provided alternatives. Before investing resources in developing and agreeing international logistics arrangements it might be worth exploring competitor and alternatives in key countries from which you expect to attract orders.

If international orders will be a sizeable part of your sales over the internet, you might want to consider being able to take those orders in the native currency of the cardholders i.e. US orders in Dollars and European orders in Euros, in order to do so, the easiest way forward is to set-up foreign exchange accounts with your internet merchant account provider.