Rupee values read as dollars — Meta ROAS was inflated by a factor of 83

The situation

An Indian fashion DTC brand running on WooCommerce had implemented Meta CAPI using a popular WordPress plugin. Their Meta dashboard showed a 240x ROAS. The brand was celebrating. The media buyer was confused — these numbers don't exist in ecommerce.

The problem

The WooCommerce Meta CAPI plugin was sending order revenue values in INR (e.g., 4999 for a ₹4,999 order) but with no currency parameter — defaulting to USD in Meta's system. Meta was interpreting ₹4,999 INR (~$60 USD) as $4,999 USD. With an actual average order value of $60 and Meta treating it as $4,999, the reported ROAS was ~83x the real figure.

What we did

1. Pulled CAPI event logs from Meta Events Manager — purchase events showing value: 4999, currency: "USD"
2. Confirmed WooCommerce store currency was INR — plugin was not reading currency setting correctly
3. Fixed plugin configuration to pass currency: "INR" in all purchase event payloads
4. Recalculated true ROAS: $60 USD average order value, $12 CPP — actual ROAS was 5x (still excellent)
5. Rebuilt budget allocation based on true 5x ROAS — increased spend with accurate expectations

Why it worked

Currency codes are mandatory in Meta event payloads — without them, Meta defaults to USD. This creates enormous inflation for any currency with a higher nominal value than USD (INR, IDR, KRW, JPY, etc.). A ₹5,000 INR order showing as $5,000 USD turns a good 5x ROAS into a nonsensical 417x ROAS. Many WooCommerce CAPI plugins have this bug in their default configuration.