For some reason PayPal is still quite big in Germany; about 28% of online revenue in 2025.
Also Austria, perhaps Italy, but I have less direct experience there.
Also Austria, perhaps Italy, but I have less direct experience there.
In other countries Revolut is popular for the friends and family bill splitting, in places like Sweden they have a PayPal-like solution offered by local banks. There’s an upcoming initiative by Brussels to bring all these national initiatives under one umbrella, which would definitely hurt PayPal’s German revenue in future.
I have, but never use, a 'credit card'. The thing I use every day is a 'debit card', where the money comes straight from my account. But it still has 16 digits and Visa written on the front.
Since then MasterCard has tried to force banks into dropping GiroCard, by refusing to work with smaller banks that still support GiroCard, and by offering better conditions to larger banks that drop GiroCard.
This has increased the number of Germans with Visa/MasterCard, but it's still below 50%.
If the supplier goes out of business / fails to deliver, the bank/credit card company is equally liable. A Section 75 claim is allowed for purchases between £100 and £30,000.
https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/consumers/complaints-...
All the traditional large ones seem to have AFAIK.
Off topic but I really hate N26 and its ilk. They don't really follow the German laws that say that German residents can have bank accounts, so they refuse people that are still on work visas, which is a pain in the fucking ass when you have a startup and the young employees are telling the immigrants "get N26" or something else, but the immigrants can't have it and only learn after submitting lots of docs to N26.
They check during the KYC process via mobile phone camera, and will reject people without a residence permit (Aufenthaltserlaubnis, Blue Card, etc), and they claim several things, from "we don't accept work visas" to "I never saw this document in my life".
Legally, a work visa is an Aufenthaltserlaubnis according to § 4 AufenthG, so N26 is classifying it wrongly here.
But it gets worse because they're breaking § 31 ZKG, which says they're obligated to provide an account for everyone here legally. We have formally complained to BAFIN about it.
Just copied the above law paragraphs from an HR discussion, btw, this is a recurring issue...
And I know this from helping several others, since I'm the startup ecosystem. I'm European, but not German.
My Girocard has Maestro integration, so I can use it overseas, but no number. Apparently this is gonna go away.
The Girocard naturally has ApplePay, which is what I use daily.
People used to use Paypal because they have only debit cards. But with better card security and alternatives like SEPA and Wero there is way less need.
Many Germans don't have credit cards (I don't), so PayPal is pretty convenient as it can withdraw directly from a SEPA account and enables online shopping.
Google Pay cannot do SEPA, but allows adding PayPal as a payment method, so PayPal also gets you into the Google purchase ecosystem.
Revolut with its virtual CCs has been making some inroads lately, though.