I have implemented user IP detection to several of my eCommerce sites, so that it shows the currency and delivery charges based upon the users location. All is good, and this system has been working for a while, but I have began to notice a worrying side effect with the search engines.
Google seems to only crawl websites using US based IP's; country searches such as on google.co.uk now show prices by default in $'s (within the listings), which are reducing the number of click-throughs as prices are no longer being shown in the user's local currency.
The impact is even greater as these are all UK based sites. Even though they are setup to sell to the global market, we still want to keep our local market strong.
One way could be to exclude the currency/delivery detection for the spider IP range, but the same still applies; we have a big following in Europe, US, Australia and New Zealand who convert better if they see their local currency within the search listings.
There are product feeds setup with google, but these don't filter into the main search listings.
The alternative route is to implement country targeting through subfolders/subdomains (/uk/, /us/, /fr/, /it/), however this seems very clunky in a modern internet. For example I would have to list every country in Europe, even though they all pay in euros, and all have the same delivery price; in effect I'd be creating x50 extra identical pages for each product (as there are around 50 countries in europe)
Any suggestions?
.gb .usd {display: none;}
to hide all US$ span elements