This articles explains the effects of changing the currency on Vendorati.com.
When you create your Vendorati account you are asked to select a currency for aggregating the data from various marketplaces that might use different currencies. At this point, selecting one currency over another does not affect anything since your account doesn’t have any data.
However, you may choose to change the reporting currency later, when your account may have a lot of data.
We proud ourselves with the fact that we use daily exchange rates, unlike other software that uses the latest exchange rates to aggregate sales numbers of various currencies. This means that Vendorati is extremely accurate when converting sales from Euros to US Dollars for example. On Vendorati, a sale made in United States 2 years ago will be presented in euros using the exchange rate from 2 years ago, not the exchange rate from today.
Unfortunately, having this kind of precision comes at a cost: switching the reporting currency from one to another might take a long time, depending on how much data your account has (see examples below).
In order to keep using Vendorati and let you to change the reporting currency whenever you want we came to a compromise by implementing a 2 step process of updating the exchange rates
- When you change the currency we update all the data in your account to use today’s exchange rate. This operation is instant and lets you look at the stats using the currency of your choice. The data for the recent days will be very accurate but old sales data, not so much.
- In the background we start a process of updating the data using the daily exchange rates. This might take between 1 minute or 30 minutes depending on how much data your account has. After that is done you will have the daily exchange rates applied to your sales data.
How much data is “a lot”
A lot of data means a lot of sales spread over a long period of time. For example if you have 10000 orders and only 7 days, that is not a lot of data since there are only a few days where the daily exchange rates are going to be applied. However, if you have 20000 orders over 100 days, that is a lot of data because 100 days have to be updated.
Our tests show the following:
- it takes 6 seconds to update the exchange rates for an account with 100K orders spread over 50 days
- it takes 15 minutes to update the exchange rates for an account with 200k order spread over 700 days
So please, keep this in mind when changing the reporting currency after your account is populated with data