Currency conversion rates not updating in Magento CE 1.X - Solved!

In a globalised world, it is important that customers are able to order and purchase products from businesses located across the world. Easiest way of doing that is by using official or authorised webshops. Businesses understand that now and hence alot of webshops are multi-currency these days. Ie. visitors are able to select their own currency in global webshops and see product prices and other amounts in their own local currency. We too have a lot of clients whose webshops have multiple currencies enabled for their customers.

Magento is built in a way that one currency has to be setup as base currency. That is the currency of the country where the business is located.
All prices have to be entered in the base currency and then the system then converts that base currency value to other currencies, using conversion rates saved in the configuration.

We recently started getting notification emails with subject 'Currency update warnings' from some of our multi-currency webshops. These warnings mentioned that the currency conversion rates were not getting retrieved. This needed to be checked and fixed urgently as it is very important to keep currency conversion rates up-to-date at all times. Not doing that can result in your customers being charged the wrong / outdated amounts when they pay in any currency other than the base one.

When we tried to update currency rates manually from backend we got these errors:

Google finance: Cannot retrieve rate from http://www.google.com/finance/converter?a=1&from=&to=

Webservicex: Cannot retrieve rate from http://www.webservicex.net/CurrencyConvertor.asmx/ConversionRate?FromCurrency=USD&ToCurrency=GBP.

A bit of digging around made it clear that both of these currency conversion rate providers were not reliable anymore. They were either regularly changing their URLs or were not being supported at all.

It was clear that we needed to add another reliable source of currency conversion rates to the system. There are many providers like xe.com and fixer.io. We selected fixer.io as it is also recommended by Magento.

You can also download M1 extension from here. This extension adds Fixer.io webservice to the list of available currency conversion webservices in Magento.

Once you upload the extension files to your Magento root and install it, you need to enable it as well. To enable go to System > Configuration > Currency Setup and select Fixer.io from the dropdown.

To use Fixer.io services, you also need to create a free account at Fixer.io website and get your free API Access Key. The free subscription is enough for most webshops, as they only need to update the currency rates a few times a day.

To see that it is working or not, go to System > Manage Currency > Rates and select Fixer.io from the dropdown > then click on "Import" button start the currency update. In a few moments you will see that the fields will get populated with latest currency rates. Don't forget to save these new rates using the 'Save currency rates' button.

If you wish, and we suggest that you do it, you can also enable automatic/scheduled imports to update the currency conversion rates in your Magento webshop.
To do that, you need to login to Magento backoffice > System > Configuration > Currency Settings > Scheduled Import Settings and select Fixer.io from the dropdown.

Don't forget to save your changes. This should solve your currency conversion rate update issue in Magento CE 1.X.

Feel free to contact Hugersoft if you are facing any such issues in your Magento webshop.