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>There are alternatives that are cheaper and work just as fine.

Do you have an example? Debit cards have very similar cost structures, cash is more expensive to handle.

Lastschrift works fine for me.

And you can use that to buy goods online? Direct debit is usually used for recurrent billing. In Portugal there's a way to use a similar system for online purchases by generating a code that you then have to use in an ATM or online banking. It makes for a pretty poor customer experience when purchasing and I doubt it's actually cheaper these days than debit/credit payment processing.

Amazon certainly accepts payments that way. And many other online retailers offer GiroPay, which I think is a payment method based on SEPA Credit Transfer. I don't know about the cost structure of that one.

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