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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

That's actually quite interesting. It reminds me that Japan as a whole has very low credit card penetration as well, and the primary mode of transaction is cash, even for items costing hundreds of dollars (or tens of thousands of yen, to be precise). Use of 10,000 yen bills (~$100) is routine.

People still have latent mistrust for handing over credit card information online. Virtually all courier services have a "pay upon arrival" option which allows you to pay for the cost of the item + the shipping when you receive the item. The courier then pays the retailer for the item cost.

edit: It may also have to do with the fact that the financial services industry there is even more sales driven and more scammy than its U.S. counterpart, and hence the public has a mistrust for all financial "products" that are anything other than super conservative.

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I remember building my first EC site in Japan. The payment processor gave us an API to use that included all the fancy options of paying at a convience store, COD, Bank Transfer and credit cards. It seemed really weird at first, but then I noticed how nice it was for people who did not have credit cards.

It was always fun to know that the payment notification handler on the server would get hit when someone goes to 7-11 and pays their bill.

I forget the percentage, but most orders were not using credit cards.

That's really quite interesting. Could you share the processor for curiosity's sake?

Pretty much all Japanese payment processors support payment at convenience store.

http://www.gmo-pg.com/ and http://www.paygent.co.jp/ are two examples.

What sort of credit card penetration do other parts of the world such as Western Europe/Eastern Europe/Middle East/SE Asian Countries/Australia... other places.

Where do you get the information that you wrote about? I'd be very interested to read into it further. Anybody know any relevant works off the top of your head that you could share?

From my experience in Nepal credit cards are pretty much non-existent....apart from the local cards which only work within the confines of Nepal & India.

Credit card penetration is pretty high in Australia.

Its a few years old, but as of 2009 at least 65% of Australians have credit card debt. http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4102.0Main+Fe...

Where do you get the information that you wrote about? I'd be very interested to read into it further. Anybody know any relevant works off the top of your head that you could share?

Unfortunately this is from anecdotal experience. I was living and working in Japan for some time so I saw first hand what services are offered and how people behave.

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