Probably. I've had this problem before and it is a pain to solve. Basically, check the collation AND charset on your database as a whole and also on each individual table that's part of the ecommerce package. It's less likely but also possible that PHP itself does not have the proper UTF-8 encoding enabled or set (but don't worry about that until you've verified the database things).

I've looked in my database and I'm not to sure when it comes to things like this so I'll list the what I've found and hopefully it will make sense to you.

The database is MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8) and I believe the database collation and table collation is set to utf8_general_ci

I'm thinking it might be my hosting server as my internal testing server works fine.

What I've noticed is when I add the £ symbol in the global currency or page attribute and save the page it shows fine and I went into the database and the symbol seems to be entered into the database as UTF-8.

Now this is where it gets strange. When I view the page everything shows fine including the static cart page for the e-commerce package.

The problem seems to occur when the value is retrieved and displayed via the dialog boxes. I dont fully understand how C5 retrieves the values so could it be a php.ini or server problem.

Thanks in advance

Yeah, sorry I probably can't help much -- I could barely figure it out in my own situation with full access to the code and server and MySQL. I suggest making a support request for the eCommerce module (go to the addon's marketplace and click "Support" in the sidebar).

I finally got a response from my hosting company and there fix worked for future reference if anyone has they same problem.

Your database is storing the data in UTF-8; whereas the web servers default character set is ISO-8859-1.

If you add the following to your htaccess, then this should fix the issue:
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Thanks! Fixed my issue with scandic letters and euro signs. :)