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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Well yeah, paying with a credit card in physical stores is rare in Europe (and usually considered very strange). People use debit cards or cash (the distribution between these varies per country). I've seen Americans try to pay with a credit card in a supermarket in the Netherlands and have it fail. It probably works more often now, but don't expect it to work everywhere.

People in Europe tend to only use a credit card for online purchases outside of their own country; most people don't have a credit card at all. Online purchases tend to be done with national systems like the Dutch IDeal (this even works with large international shops like Amazon and Steam).

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paying with a credit card in physical stores is rare in Europe (and usually considered very strange).

There is no difference between the mechanics of paying with credit card and paying with a debit card, at least none that I've ever noticed. I hold up my card to the reader and sometimes enter my PIN. I'm not even sure if there is a way for the person accepting the payment to tell if it's a credit or debit card I'm using.

I've seen Americans try to pay with a credit card in a supermarket in the Netherlands and have it fail.

I've had places fail to accept my Swedish debit card in the Netherlands. It's more to do with some places only accepting local cards or not accepting, for example, Master Card, rather than debit vs credit cards.

> Well yeah, paying with a credit card in physical stores

Maestro and Visa Electron are already or soon will be full discontinued. How can you even tell a debit and a credit card a part nowadays? The only distinction between my credit and debit Visa cards is a single word sign in a tiny font at the back (I live in a EU country).

So unless those Americans are trying to with Amex/Discovery/smth similar cards I'd find this really surprising.

Even a decade or two ago Germany was the only country I've been to where it was only possible to pay with these regional debit cards in some places. I really don't think this was an "Europe" wide thing for a quite a while now.

There must be a way for card processors to know if the payment is debit or credit because there are stores in the US that only accept debit.

Yeah, I think US is somewhat different, the fees for credit cards seem to be much higher there while in the EU they are caped at 0.3% for credit and 0.2% for debit cards + bank fees .

I wish iDeal was accepted more widely. Stripe/Mollie/Adyen et al support it but it has enabled explicitly. This is especially annoying for Shopify stores.

I don't know what the hangup is (maybe it needs to be reported to the Dutch government since it's obviously coming from a NL national?).

Until then, we'll have to keep using a low limit credit card or Paypal for many online purchases.

Even in The Netherlands where, I was told by a local debit cards were the norm, I paid for things all last week with a credit card without anyone giving it a second look or having the slightest problem. I was prepared to use my debit card begrudgingly as it doesn't cover foreign exchange fees like one of my credit cards do. But I never needed to.

The distinction between debit and credit card is not really what is at play here, but rather, whether Visa or MasterCard is accepted. A Visa credit card or a US Visa debit are both Visa, so if a place doesn't accept Visa it won't accept either, but if it does accept Visa (increasingly the norm) then both credit and debit work. It's just that in Netherlands none of the debit cards are Visa/Mastercard so people might be mistakenly attributing the card acceptance as being about a debit/crédit distinction.

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