Why RAXXO Prices Everything in EUR

One Currency, No Guessing Game

I picked EUR for RAXXO Studios before the store had a single product listed, and I have not touched that decision since. The reasoning was boring on purpose. A one-person studio cannot afford a pricing decision that needs revisiting every time a market moves. If I priced in multiple currencies, every new product would mean multiple numbers to set, multiple numbers to keep in sync when I change one of them, and multiple numbers to explain when a customer in a different country asks why the shirt costs more or less than the one their friend bought.

EUR-only removes that entire category of problem. There is exactly one number per product, set once, referenced everywhere: in the theme, in the blog when I mention a price, in the confirmation email a customer gets after checkout (I wrote about that email in The Email Every RAXXO Customer Gets After They Buy). One number means one source of truth. I never have to ask myself which price is current, because there is only ever one.

It also matches how the studio actually sells. RAXXO runs two product lines from one storefront, merch and terminal tools (I covered that split in Why RAXXO Studios Sells Both Merch and Terminal Tools), and both lines ship to a genuinely international audience. No single market dominates enough to justify pricing around it. Picking a home currency and letting the platform handle the rest was the only choice that scaled to that spread without asking me to become a foreign exchange desk on the side.

There is a second reason, less about spreadsheets and more about tone. A store that prices in five currencies reads like it is optimizing for every wallet in the room. A store that prices in one reads like it knows what it is and is not trying to be everything to everyone. RAXXO sells developer tools and merch for people who build things. The pricing should feel as direct as the products do. One number, no asterisk explaining which currency, no toggle in the header. If a shopper wants to know what something costs, the answer is right there, and it is the same answer for every shopper who looks.

I also thought about the decision from the angle of what happens when I am wrong about a price. Every product gets adjusted eventually, a tool graduates out of an introductory number, a piece of merch gets repriced when a supplier changes. With one currency, that adjustment is one edit in one place, live everywhere at once. With five currencies, the same adjustment becomes five edits, made in some order, live at slightly different times depending on how fast I work through the list. Somewhere in that gap sits a window where the same product shows two different intended prices depending on which region a shopper is browsing from. That window is exactly the kind of small inconsistency a solo studio cannot afford to introduce on purpose. One currency closes it before it can open.

What EUR-Only Looks Like At Checkout

Here is the part that surprises people who assume EUR-only means every buyer needs a EUR bank account: it does not. Shopify's checkout layer converts the listed EUR price into a shopper's local currency automatically, using a live exchange rate, right at the point of payment. Someone browsing from outside the eurozone sees the product page in EUR and then sees their own currency at the final payment step, handled by the platform, not by me.

That split matters. The store's job is to state one honest price. The payment processor's job is to translate that price into whatever the shopper's card actually charges. I do not maintain a lookup table, I do not manually update anything when an exchange rate moves, and I never have to decide whether a currency swing justifies a price change on my end. The platform absorbs the fluctuation, the listed EUR price stays put, and the shopper still gets a number in their own currency before they commit to paying.

This is also why I never write a dollar sign anywhere in the store, the blog, or a product description, no matter how many buyers pay in dollars in practice. The listed price is the EUR price. Writing a second currency next to it would imply the store is quoting two official prices, and it is not. There is one price. Everything downstream of that, including what a specific card gets charged in a specific currency on a specific day, belongs to the checkout, not the product page.

The same logic carries into support conversations. When someone emails asking about a charge that showed up in their local currency, the answer is always the same: the store price is in EUR, the number on your statement is what your bank or card network converted that EUR price into. I am not hiding a second price system behind the scenes. I am pointing at the same one number everyone else sees.

That answer only works because it is true, and it stays true because I never gave myself an escape hatch to make it complicated. It would be easy to quietly special-case a market someday, a region-specific number here, a promotional price there, each one reasonable on its own. I have avoided that on purpose. The moment a second price exists anywhere in the system, the simple support answer stops being simple, and a shopper who compares notes with someone in another country starts asking questions I would rather not have to answer with a paragraph of caveats. One price, one currency, one honest sentence in a support reply. That is worth protecting even when a one-off exception would look harmless in isolation.

Why 5EUR Instead of €5

The format rule sits right next to the currency rule, and it exists for a reason most people never think about: the euro symbol does not render reliably everywhere I write. Liquid templates, markdown files, email clients, social captions, and terminal output do not all treat "€" the same way. Encoding issues turn it into a stray box or a broken character often enough that I stopped trusting it as a default. Writing "5EUR" sidesteps the whole problem. It is plain ASCII, it renders identically in a Liquid section, a blog draft, a changelog entry, or a plain text email, and nobody has to guess what the broken symbol was supposed to say.

There is a readability argument too. Currency symbols look nearly identical at a glance, especially in a small font or a quick scroll, and a shopper skimming a page should never have a half-second of doubt about which currency they are looking at. Writing "5EUR" instead of a symbol removes the ambiguity entirely. Three letters cannot be mistaken for a different symbol the way two similar-looking glyphs can, and unambiguous is worth more than a little visual polish on a storefront that sells to people who value precision in their own work.

The rule extends to anywhere a number and a currency sit next to each other, not just product pages. A price mentioned in a changelog entry, a support reply, or a caption for a product photo follows the same "number then EUR" pattern. I do not have a separate style for casual mentions and a separate style for the storefront itself. If I typed the rule once and applied it everywhere without exception, I would never have to stop and think about which format a given surface expects. That kind of small, boring consistency is the whole point. Nobody notices formatting that never breaks. Everybody notices formatting that does.

It also keeps every price consistent no matter where it appears. A price mentioned in a blog post reads the same as a price on a product page, which reads the same as a price in an email. I do not have to remember a different formatting convention for prose versus templates versus code comments. One format, one currency, applied everywhere without exception, means nobody, including me, has to think twice about what a number means.

The Trade-Off I Accepted On Purpose

None of this is free. EUR-only pricing means the sticker price looks slightly different to a shopper depending on where their currency happens to sit against the euro on a given day. Two people in two countries can see two different final charges for the same product, through no fault of the store, purely because currencies move. I accepted that trade-off deliberately. The alternative, running true multi-currency pricing with region-specific numbers I set and adjust myself, is a maintenance job with no natural end point. Every product launch would mean setting several prices instead of one. Every price change would mean updating several numbers instead of one, and checking that none of them drifted out of the relationship I intended.

I would rather ship a product with one clean number and let the payment layer do the currency work it already does well, than own a second job I never asked for. The design system that ties five RAXXO tools together (I wrote about that system in The Design System That Makes Five RAXXO Tools Feel Like One Studio) follows the same instinct: fewer moving parts that I fully understand beats more moving parts that look more sophisticated on paper. Pricing gets the same treatment. One currency I control completely beats several currencies I would only half control.

Bottom Line

EUR-only pricing is not a limitation I am waiting to outgrow. It is a decision I would make again today with the same reasoning: one number per product, one format for every price, one system handling the currency conversion so I never have to. The instinct behind it is the same instinct behind most of how RAXXO runs, keep the surface simple even when the audience is not, and let the platform do the part it is genuinely good at instead of rebuilding it myself.

If the studio ever grows into a shape where true multi-currency pricing earns its keep, I will revisit it with real numbers in front of me, not before. Until then, every product on raxxo.shop carries one price, in one currency, written one way, and that consistency is worth more to me than the extra polish a currency toggle would add. Simple rules are easier to keep than clever ones, and a pricing rule I can explain in one sentence is a rule I will actually follow six months from now.

This article contains affiliate links. If you sign up through them, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. (Ad)