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I am preparing to sell software products to a global market. Customers will be companies of a technical or engineering nature. Cost of a license will be in the USD $500-$2000 range.

Which currency or currencies should I quote my price? Right now I plan to use USD but my accounts and expenses are in GBP so GBP would make sense too. A third option might be EUR - I'm seeing a lot of similar software priced in EUR.

I am not overly concerned about exchange rate losses or risks. More interesting to me is the perception to the customer. I know that if, for example, I was buying software whose price was quoted in, e.g. HKD, rightly or wrongly I might doubt that company's integrity. EUR and USD are, or at least should be, stable and reliable currencies. Does a GBP quoted price suggest a respectable vendor? USDEUR volatility tends to be greater than that of the GBPUSD and GBPEUR pairs so GBP might be a useful middle ground from that perspective.

Take a Japanese customer... does it really matter to him whether my products are priced GBP or USD? Ditto someone in Germany? If I had to guess, USD-native customers might be 25-35% of my market.

So USD, GBP, EUR or multiple? Many thanks.

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Since writing, I discovered this link: network.businessofsoftware.org/forum/topics/2352433:Topic:675 - in a nutshell, everyone's used to paying USD and it's best to start with USD single currency pricing. – paperjam Jun 22 '12 at 22:38

2 Answers

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Where are the majority of your customer's located?

If they are evenly spread across the world, use your own currency.

If the majority are in the EU, use the Euro.

If the majority are in the US, use the dollar.

Or build a web site that detects the customer's probable country based on IP code and gives a price in the matching currency.

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If you are going to be exporting try to place your product in a currency in whinch the exchange rate will not affect the final cost of the product

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