Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Amazon conversion rates - Better to charge USD to your card

While purchasing an item from Amazon, realized that now a days Amazon gives an option to charge in local currency. For details look here

But is it worth letting Amazon does the conversion ? Or let your local credit card does the conversion?. Initially I thought Amazon could do a better job based on the volume and it's good for them to get wholesale customers. It's a delta income for them on top of sale so they should make it as competitive as possible to make it a norm.

But unfortunately, for SGD it's not the case. There is a quite a bit of difference between Amazon conversion rate vs your local bank conversion rate.

Here is a screen shot showing amazon conversion rate for SGD which is ~ 1.3059. My credit card company charged me 1.2644. So Amazon charges approx 3-4% higher. If the order is worth, 1,000 you'd be paying close to $ 30 extra to Amazon for doing the conversion.

Not sure what is the practice for other currencies like GBP or EUR. If you guys know plz share :)

2 comments:

  1. Hi, may I know which bank credit card are you using to purchase from amazon?

    ReplyDelete