You may have wondered why a modern mail order retailer like us doesn’t offer all the „modern“ payment methods. After all, they are a dime a dozen: Paypal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, Alipay, iDeal, Billie, EPS, TWINT, BePay, NuPay, Repay, WePay, YouPay, PostePay, Przelewy24, GiroPay. For fun, we included a payment provider in the list that does not even exist. Do you know which one it is?*
20 years ago, when a bank transfer still took 3-4 days and secure payments on the Internet were an unsolved problem, credit cards or PayPal were a great thing. Fast, simple, secure. A lot has changed since then. In 2012, a regulation was introduced throughout the EU, according to which a bank transfer may take a maximum of one working day to arrive. In reality, it is much faster already. Most payments from customers are credited to our account within just a few hours. If you order from us in the evening and immediately make the payment online, it will usually be with us before the parcel is packed the next day.
Instant bank transfers (SEPA Instant Credit Transfer) have been available since 2017. This means that payments are credited to the recipient in 10 seconds. Almost all banks now offer this payment method. Some free of charge, others for a very small fee. In February 2024, it was decided at EU level that all banks must offer these instant transfers by fall 2025 at the latest and that these must not cost more than a normal wire transfer. Instant bank transfers will therefore become the norm.
Additionally, there is the EPC QR code (also known as the GiroCode) which you can scan with your banking app. With that, all the required fields will be filled automatically, so you don’t need to type in the account number or payment amount. It can hardly get any more simple than that!
We welcome this development and have been encouraging our customers to give the good old bank transfer a chance again. Now, such a large proportion of payments are made via this method that it is no longer worthwhile for us to offer other payment methods at all. This is the reason why you will no longer find a list of payment methods to choose from.
With our store we are doing a lot of things differently. Here, too, we are daring to do something that many in online retail would describe as completely crazy. Maybe we are too? You can find out!
*That was of course a trick question. These payment processors all exist and we could have listed 20 more!
