Selling in more than one currency
Selling across borders is mostly straightforward until some piece of arithmetic quietly assumes euros. The failures are rarely visible in testing and are usually large when they arrive, so it is worth knowing where they live.
Each event has its own currency
You price an event in the currency you actually sell in, and buyers are charged in that currency. Fees, discounts and reporting all follow the event rather than a platform default.
This matters if you run events in several countries. A conference in Zurich priced in Swiss francs and a meetup in Warsaw priced in złoty are two events with two currencies, not one currency with a conversion applied at the edge. Buyers see a real price in a real currency rather than a converted approximation that changes between the listing and the payment screen.
Currencies without decimal places
This is the one that has cost other platforms real money, and it is worth understanding even if you never sell in yen.
Japanese yen and Hungarian forint have no minor unit. There are no "yen cents". Payment systems universally represent amounts in the smallest unit of the currency — €10.00 is transmitted as 1000 cents — so code that converts a displayed price to a charge amount by multiplying by 100 is correct for euros, dollars and pounds, and catastrophically wrong for yen.
¥3,000 becomes 300,000, and a Japanese buyer is charged one hundred times the intended price. It is not a rounding error and it is not subtle at the bank. It is also the kind of bug that passes every test written by a developer whose test data is in euros.
Amount conversion happens in one place on this platform, precisely so that this class of bug has nowhere to live. It is one of those defects where the only reliable defence is structural — you cannot expect every future contributor to remember which of the world's currencies have two decimal places.
Fixed-amount discounts stay in their currency
A "€10 off" code cannot discount a yen event by 10. Ten yen is about six cents; ten euros is a meaningful discount. Neither reading is a translation of the offer.
So fixed-amount codes apply only to events priced in their own currency. Percentage codes work anywhere, because a percentage means the same thing in every currency. If you are running one campaign across several countries, use a percentage — it is the only kind that is portable without a currency conversion nobody agreed to.
Fee floors and caps are currency-aware too
Our €0.20 floor and €0.50 cap are cash amounts, and a cash amount only means something in a currency.
Applying euro bounds directly to an order in a currency with a much smaller unit value would be a serious error in your disfavour — a "€0.20 minimum" read as 20 units of a low-value currency is not a floor, it is an arbitrary charge. The bounds are converted rather than applied literally, for exactly that reason.
The same care applies to the risk thresholds that decide whether a high-value event gets a review before going live. Those are stated in euros and converted before comparison, because a bare threshold of 50 applied to a forint-priced event would flag every ticket ever sold.
What is not ours
Card processing currencies, cross-border fees and conversion are handled by Stripe under your own agreement with them. If a German buyer pays for a Swiss-franc event, whatever conversion happens and whatever it costs is between Stripe, the buyer's bank and you.
Two practical consequences. Cards issued outside the EEA generally cost more to process, which is Stripe's pricing and shows up in your Stripe account rather than your EventMann invoice. And if you want to be paid out in a currency other than the one you sold in, that is a Stripe payout setting on your own account.
Practical advice
- Price in the currency your audience thinks in. A local audience quoted in euros for a złoty-priced country is doing mental arithmetic at the moment you least want them thinking.
- Do not mirror one event in several currencies. You get split inventory, duplicate listings and a support question about which one is real.
- Test one real transaction per new currency. Small, real, and check what actually landed. Ten minutes against the alternative.