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Comment by thirdsun | Hacker News Reader

As a german that's not my experience at all. Credit cards aren't that common here and SEPA transfers are slow as hell and always a minor hassle, that I tend to avoid as long as I can.

Without Paypal a lot of european customers wouldn't be able to buy from international vendors.

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As someone who sell stuff to Germans, could you please get a credit card? The only reason why we need to deal with PayPal is our German customer, 50% or more of our transactions in Germany is PayPal.

It's a shitty company, with a shitty product.

Well, over here (in Germany) everyone gets a bank-issued debit card while a credit card usually comes with additional fees (I think it's 20-30€/year in my case, not sure right now). While it's not much, and I absolutely need a credit card for international purchases, a lot of fellow germans simply don't see the benefit when they could as well use the free debit card their bank gave them. And online their Paypal account is linked to their banking account which enables instant payments without credit cards.

>Well, over here everyone I my case it would be down there... Took a second to figure out you're probably not in the US.

It's more or less the same here, almost no one has real credit card, they're mostly VISA (co-branded) or MasterCard branded debit cards, but everyone has a card that can be used online.

> It's more or less the same here, almost no one has real credit card, they're mostly VISA (co-branded) or MasterCard branded debit cards

Er, no. Almost everyone has a branded debit card, as most banks will give you that for free, but nearly 75% of the country has at least one actual credit card.

Those debit cards only work for in-person transactions however. Some German companies let you do direct debits or bank transfers for online payments, but it's very annoying compared to a real debit card.

I live in Germany, and two of my credit cards have a monthly fee of EUR 0.00. One of them even has zero fees for foreign currency transactions and ATM withdrawals, which is why I got that particular one. There are good cards available in Germany if you look around.

Edit: EUR 0.00 annual fee, of course.

I'd like to recommend the bank Number26. They're german and operate across most of europe.

https://number26.eu/

Seriously, if you're european, try these guys out - they're worth it.

You saying that they operate across most of europe and if you're european, try these guys out. Then their own site having lines like Your bank account just as mobile as you are. and Banking everywhere made me think for a moment that they may actually offer their services across Europe.

Not the case. Digging deeper [1] we can find this: The only conditions are that you're at least 18 years old and have a residential address in Germany or Austria.

[1] https://number26.eu/bank-account/

I assume their landing page is not up to date.

https://support.number26.eu/read/000001280?locale=en

Pretty sure they have customers in Ireland (some discussion about stamp duty on debit cards few months ago)

I'm in Greece right now, didn't have any trouble setting up a bank account with them.

What about debit cards? I mean, you don't carry cash around all the time do you?

Of course not. Yes, in fact bank-issued debit cards are the default here.

Worth pointing out that "bank-issued debit cards" in Germany usually refers to EC Cards, which is not the same as the Visa / Mastercard debit cards the rest of the world is used to. As a tourist in early 2015, international Visa & Mastercards were useless in most supermarkets & department stores - but international chains that get lots of tourists will take them (eg Starbucks, McDonalds, Subway etc).

I love Germany, but the credit card thing drives me nuts. I understand Germans like financial privacy, but I like having an electronic record of my purchases instead of having to write down every cash transaction I make before I forget it. (If there was a way to get a prepaid EC Karte as a tourist, I might not mind so much.)

Most people still pay with cash. I would guess that per average people have about 50-100$ in their pockets.

In Germany people do carry cash. Especially in Berlin, where there are plenty of smaller stores and restaurants that accept only cash.

I do now that I live near Nuremberg, which is one of the safest cities in the world, but it was a hard thing to get used to, as I went to college in a US city rather infamous for its crime.

Surprisingly large restaurants in Nuremberg do not take credit cards. A lot of German and Austrian small business owners see no good reason to pay the credit card companies the ~3% fee when most of their customers are perfectly happy to settle a 500 EUR bill in cash. Always pay your hotel bill in rural Austria the night before you leave to prevent an emergency dash to the village ATM :)

>A lot of German and Austrian small business owners see no good reason to pay the credit card companies the ~3% fee when most of their customers are perfectly happy to settle a 500 EUR bill in cash.

Well, and mostly to avoid paying taxes. Card acceptance cost is down to under 1% since last year and often depositing money costs more.

There is no requirement for proper cash registers here in Germany, so card acceptance remains low in small businesses.

Germany has its own shitty debit card system called "girocard". And whereas other smart countries (e.g. UK) switched to international schemes, this is still the card issued to most customers. There are a few downsides of this

* No Card-Not-Present-Transactions, because the cobranding is only for abroad

* Visa/MasterCard cobranding was not allowed until a few days ago (when the EU introduced new laws)

* Used to have high minimum fees (7 cents) for a long time, so expensive for smaller transactions

* Cashback only from 20€

* No damn contactless

=> Germanys banking sector is still mostly stuck back in 2000. Debit cards are around, but mostly for cash withdraws. Smaller transactions are mostly paid in cash, because they used to be expensive and no contactless.

The big banks have no interest in changing that, because as long as card payments are unpopular, they can charge >5€ for cash withdraws if you make "out-of-network" ATM withdraws.

tl;dr: Germany has its own shitty debit card system stuck in 2000 which sucks.

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