Forum Moderators: buckworks
We have unfortunately had bad experiences with direct debit. As you might know, customers can instruct their bank to return the debit note within at least six weeks.
So, our experience has been that customers make an order, but then later they tell their bank to return the money, OR, the bank finds out they didn't have any money.
And this starts from our side a bigger operation where we send customers invoices etc, try to get our money back.
With big orders, we tend to check customers liability to use direct debit, but this is also very expensive, around 9€ per name.
So now we removed direct debit from our pages, and only offer credit card payments. We are also going to implement COD soon.
My question is, do other etailers have same kind of experiences in Germany, and how have you solved this?
I'm also interested into finding out other payment options for German customers, since CC and COD are not that popular, but I haven't found a good source for more information about this.
IMHO the most popular payment method here is just wire transfer.
Here are two options: pre-payment and post-payment.
Most transactions on eBay are done by pre-payment: you get an invoice per e-mail, then wire transfer to the accout data stated there (amount, bank name, bank code (BLZ), account owner, account number), pay invoice, then purchased goods are sent to you.
Companies selling from their web sites often just send invoice together with goods purchased, stating that payment is required within, say, 14 days. Since industry of inkasso services (even for small amounts) is pretty developed here, customers usually pay (but I do not know exact statistics).
