The currency conversion issue has been explained several times on the forum.
First, it should noted that when you purchase something originally priced in a different currency, nobody applies the official Interbank rates, there's always a difference. This, unless you can pay in EUR directly.
On top of that, although we base the price in EUR, because we are located in Europe, we sell through Esellerate, which is a US company. This means several things:
- Regardless of the currency the customer use to pay (even if he pays in EUR), we'll be payed by Esellerate in US$. This exchange rate is, no wonder, worse than the official Interbank rate.
- When we receive a payment in US$, our own banks are exchanging *again* from US$ to EUR and the exchange rate is, no wonder, worse than the official Interbank rate.
- On top of not applying the exact Interbank rates, our banks also apply handling fees just to handle a payment in a different currency.
Because of all these costs put together, we have to add a corrective factor to the official exchange of about 7-8%, to cover all the multiple currency exchanges.
We just can't changing prices up/down to follow the currency market, over time, we adjust them if larger oscillations happens. In 2009, when the EUR reached 1.51 US$, products like JFK used to be 36$, but we lowered the price at 33$ when the EUR was in the 1.3x range.
You just have to accept the fact (that we in Europe are very accustomed to) products are simply priced differently in Europe and the US, for the very reason there are additional costs involved in selling things in different countries/currencies.
For example, an iPad (just to mention a very popular US product which is sold here as well) starts at 499$ without taxes. The price in Europe before taxes is 416 EUR, which is 554 US$ at the today rate. That's a 10% difference, which is higher than the 7-8% we put up here, with the difference Apple is surely treated much better then we'll ever be in banks fees.
