Priced in Euros, Shown in Yours

A buyer in Toronto opens a wholesale catalogue and sees a price in euros. A buyer in Osaka sees the same figure. Neither of them thinks in euros, and both are now doing arithmetic before they can decide anything.

That friction costs more than it looks. A price you have to convert is a price you compare badly. You round, you use last week's rate in your head, and you end up either walking away from a good margin or committing to a thin one. Multiply that across a forty-line assortment and the catalogue stops being a buying tool.

So the shelf price converts. Open the catalogue from the United States and it reads in US dollars; from Canada, Canadian dollars; from Australia, Australian dollars. Inside the EU it stays in euros, because that is the currency those buyers already work in. You can override it at any time from the header — the choice is remembered, and it is yours, not a guess about you.

The rate is not ours to invent. It comes from the European Central Bank's daily reference rate, and the date it was published is printed on the page. If we cannot reach that rate, we do not estimate one: the catalogue falls back to euros and says so. A price shown at a rate we made up would be worse than a price you have to convert yourself, because you would have no way of knowing it was wrong.

The invoice is the part that does not move. Orders are contracted and invoiced in euros, and every converted page says so plainly.

That is a deliberate line. Converting a display is a convenience. Changing the currency of a contract is a different business entirely: it decides who carries the exchange risk between quote and payment, which moment's rate governs, and what figure comes back on a return. A document that quotes one currency and settles in another is a document arguing with itself, and the argument is always resolved at the buyer's expense.

So we drew the line where it is honest. The catalogue speaks your currency so you can decide quickly. The contract speaks one currency so there is nothing to dispute later. What you convert is the reading, never the obligation.

For planning, treat the converted figure as accurate on the day and budget a little headroom for movement between order and payment. That is ordinary cross-border trade, and it is far easier to manage when the number in front of you is one you can read at a glance.