PayPal leads German e-commerce at 28.7%, invoice payment second, and cards a distant fourth. Germany is one of the few major markets in the world where cards are not the leading way to pay online, and merchants who arrive with a card-first checkout routinely underperform without understanding why.
The German payment mix reflects specific consumer preferences around trust, privacy, and paying only once goods have arrived. Getting it wrong is expensive. Getting it right requires accepting two methods that barely exist elsewhere.
The authoritative sources on German payment behavior are the EHI Retail Institute’s annual retail payment systems study and the Bundesbank’s payment behavior survey. The EHI 2026 study, presented at the EHI Payment Congress in Bonn in May 2026 and covering 2025 data, breaks the market down as follows.
In German e-commerce:
In physical retail:
The Bundesbank’s 2025 payment behavior study, published in June 2026, found cashless methods used for 55% of everyday payments, with mobile payments rising to 10% of all payments. For online purchases specifically, it put internet payment methods such as PayPal at 50%, direct debits and bank transfers at 30%, and credit cards at 15%.
Two things stand out. Cards are a minority method online. And the German online mix bears almost no resemblance to the in-store mix, which is unusual.
PayPal occupies a position in Germany it holds in few other countries. Beyond its 28.7% revenue share, Statista data indicates roughly 87% of German online shoppers used PayPal at least once during 2025, and the Bundesbank ranks it third for everyday purchases behind only cash and the girocard.
The reason is trust rather than convenience. German consumers are notably privacy-conscious and reluctant to hand card details to unfamiliar merchants. PayPal functions as an intermediary that removes that requirement, and its buyer protection carries real weight with German shoppers.
For merchants, the practical implication is blunt: PayPal is not an optional alternative method in Germany. A German checkout without it is missing the single largest payment method in the market.
PayPal has also extended into the deferred-payment space locally with pay-in-30-days and installment products, which overlap with the invoice behavior described below.
This is the method that catches out international merchants, because it barely exists in most markets and is the second largest in Germany at 26.1% of e-commerce revenue.
Kauf auf Rechnung, literally buying on account, means the customer receives the goods first and pays afterward, typically within 14 or 30 days. No card details, no bank details, no money up front. The customer inspects what arrived, keeps what they want, returns the rest, and settles the balance.
That maps onto two German realities. The first is the same privacy preference that drives PayPal adoption. The second is Germany’s unusually strong returns culture, particularly in fashion, where ordering several sizes and returning most of them is normal behavior. Invoice payment makes that frictionless in a way card payment does not.
For merchants, invoice brings genuine complexity: credit risk, dunning, and reconciliation across open balances. Most merchants therefore offer it through a provider that underwrites the risk, with Klarna and Riverty the common routes. The cost is higher than card acceptance, typically in the 3 to 4% range, and for many German merchants it is still worth paying.
Skipping invoice is a legitimate decision for some categories. Skipping it in fashion or home goods usually is not.
SEPA Direct Debit lets a merchant pull funds from a customer’s bank account under a signed mandate, and it remains deeply embedded in German billing habits at 14.4% of e-commerce revenue and 6.4% of retail turnover.
Its strengths are cost and stickiness. Per-transaction costs are low, often a fixed amount measured in cents rather than a percentage, which makes it one of the cheapest ways to collect recurring payments anywhere in Europe. Once a mandate exists, it continues without customer action.
The tradeoffs are the return window, during which a customer can reverse a debit, and mandate management overhead. For subscription businesses selling into Germany, Lastschrift is usually worth the operational work.
girocard is Germany’s domestic debit scheme and still dominates physical retail at 40.5% of turnover, used roughly 8.3 billion times in 2025, up from 7.9 billion in 2024. Around 88.5% of girocard payments were contactless as of December 2025. Its merchant economics are attractive, with acquirer fees commonly in the 0.2 to 0.3% range and no interchange model of the kind that applies to international schemes.
girocard matters much less online, where it has limited e-commerce reach, so for most international merchants it is a point-of-sale consideration rather than a checkout one.
International cards are growing. Visa Debit and Debit Mastercard gained 2.5 percentage points to reach 9.4% of retail turnover, the fastest-moving category in German physical retail, as issuers increasingly supply international debit alongside or instead of girocard. Credit cards remain comparatively minor at 8.2% in-store and are used more deliberately than in the US or UK.
Gr4vy’s guide to the four credit card networks covers the scheme differences, though German card share is low enough that the method mix matters more.
Mobile payments reached 10% of all German payments according to the Bundesbank, growing steadily but from a lower base than in the UK or US. Apple Pay and Google Pay are the main wallets, and because many Germans load a girocard or international debit card into them, wallet economics follow the underlying card. Gr4vy’s comparison of Apple Pay and Google Pay for merchants covers acceptance.
BNPL overlaps heavily with invoice payment in Germany, which makes the category boundary blurry. Klarna is the dominant provider and also underwrites invoice payment for many merchants. Gr4vy’s comparison of BNPL providers covers the wider provider set.
Wero, the European Payments Initiative wallet, is worth monitoring. It is a bank-backed account-to-account wallet intended to give European banks a position against the international schemes and PayPal, and Germany is one of its launch markets. Adoption is early and no merchant should prioritize it yet, but it is the most plausible structural challenger to PayPal’s German position over the next few years.
It is tempting to treat the German mix as arbitrary, which leads merchants to assume it will converge toward cards eventually. It has not, and the reasons are durable.
German consumers have strong privacy norms, reinforced by regulation and cultural attitudes toward data, which make handing card details to an unfamiliar online merchant less acceptable than it is elsewhere. Credit itself carries different connotations: the German word for debt, Schuld, also means guilt, and consumer credit has historically been viewed with more caution than in Anglophone markets. Paying only after goods arrive fits both patterns, which is why invoice payment persists rather than fading.
The practical upshot is that waiting for Germany to behave like the US or UK is not a strategy.
The German mix is one of the clearest cases of a market where the right methods differ from a merchant’s home setup, and where the ability to vary methods by country matters more than the methods themselves.
Ding, the international mobile top-up service operating across more than 140 countries, handled this by using no-code rules to show different payment methods in different markets. In Germany specifically it prioritized PayPal, reflecting exactly the local preference the EHI data describes, while promoting Pix in Brazil for the same reason. The same case study reports the time to integrate a new gateway or local payment method falling from three to six weeks down to three days, which is what makes per-market method tuning practical rather than theoretical. The detail is in the Ding case study.
The underlying point generalizes. A merchant selling into Germany, the UK, and the US needs three materially different checkouts, and the cost of maintaining that is what usually determines whether local methods get added at all.
For most merchants selling into Germany, the baseline is PayPal, invoice payment, and SEPA Direct Debit, with cards and wallets alongside rather than in front. Those three cover roughly 70% of German e-commerce revenue between them, and a checkout missing any of them is visibly incomplete to a German shopper.
Add cards and Apple Pay or Google Pay for completeness and for international customers. Add Klarna where the category suits BNPL. Monitor Wero without building for it yet. Consider girocard only if you have a physical presence.
The operational difficulty is that invoice and Lastschrift behave nothing like cards, needing different risk handling, mandate management, and reconciliation, which is why card-centric payment stacks tend to handle them badly. Running them alongside cards through one coordinating layer, and adjusting which methods appear for German customers specifically, is the problem payment orchestration addresses.
For neighboring markets, see Gr4vy’s guides to payment methods in the UK and payment methods by country.
What are the most popular payment methods in Germany?
In e-commerce, PayPal leads with 28.7% of revenue, followed by invoice payment (Kauf auf Rechnung) at 26.1%, SEPA Direct Debit at 14.4%, and credit and international debit cards at 13.7%, according to EHI’s 2026 study of 2025 data. In physical retail the picture differs, with girocard dominant at 40.5% of turnover.
Why are credit cards not popular in Germany?
German consumers have historically been cautious about consumer credit and are notably privacy-conscious about sharing card details online. Methods that avoid both, such as PayPal and invoice payment, took hold instead. Cards account for only 13.7% of German e-commerce revenue, making Germany one of the few major markets where cards are not the leading online payment method.
What is Kauf auf Rechnung?
Kauf auf Rechnung, or invoice payment, lets a customer receive goods before paying, typically settling within 14 or 30 days. No card or bank details are required up front. It accounts for 26.1% of German e-commerce revenue and suits Germany’s strong returns culture, particularly in fashion. Merchants usually offer it through a provider such as Klarna or Riverty that underwrites the credit risk.
Do I need to offer PayPal to sell in Germany?
For most consumer e-commerce, effectively yes. PayPal is the single largest online payment method in Germany at 28.7% of revenue, is offered by 95% of the top 1,000 German online shops, and around 87% of German online shoppers used it at least once in 2025. Omitting it means missing the largest method in the market.
What is girocard?
girocard is Germany’s domestic debit card scheme, dominant in physical retail with 40.5% of turnover and roughly 8.3 billion transactions in 2025. Around 88.5% of girocard payments are contactless. Its merchant fees are low, commonly 0.2 to 0.3%, but it has limited e-commerce reach, so it matters mainly to merchants with a physical presence in Germany.
Is SEPA Direct Debit worth accepting in Germany?
For recurring billing, usually yes. Lastschrift accounts for 14.4% of German e-commerce revenue, costs far less per transaction than cards, and continues automatically once a mandate exists. The tradeoffs are the window in which customers can reverse a debit and the overhead of mandate management, which is why it suits subscriptions better than one-off purchases.
What is Wero and should merchants support it?
Wero is the European Payments Initiative’s bank-backed wallet, built to give European banks an account-to-account alternative to the international card schemes and PayPal, with Germany among its launch markets. Adoption is still early, so it is not yet a priority for merchants, but it is the most credible long-term challenger to PayPal’s position in Germany.
How much does invoice payment cost merchants in Germany?
Typically in the range of 3 to 4% when offered through a provider that underwrites the credit risk, which is higher than card acceptance. Many German merchants consider it worthwhile because invoice payment converts customers who would otherwise abandon, particularly in fashion and home goods where the returns culture is strongest.
Germany punishes assumptions harder than most markets. A merchant can run a card-first checkout in the US, the UK, or Australia and do reasonably well. Doing the same in Germany means competing for the 13.7% of e-commerce revenue that runs on cards while ignoring the 55% that runs on PayPal and invoice.
The methods that matter are also the ones that are operationally awkward. Invoice payment needs credit risk handling, Lastschrift needs mandate management, and neither behaves like a card authorization. That difficulty is precisely why many international merchants skip them, and precisely why doing the work is a competitive advantage in the German market.
Gr4vy connects merchants to more than 400 payment providers and methods through a single integration, including PayPal, SEPA Direct Debit, Klarna, cards, and wallets for the German market. To talk through a German payment mix, get in touch with our team.
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