No surcharge for certain payment methods

Februar 08, 2017

A draft law proposes that retailers will no longer charge fees for bank transfers, direct debits, and card payments from 2018. In recent days, we have received several newsletters and news articles on the subject with sensational headlines via Google search. These suggest that all payment methods should be free of charge. However, this is not the case; rather, as already mentioned, it concerns bank transfers, direct debits, and card payments.

Payment methods such as Sofort Überweisung, PayPal, Paysafecard, and others are not affected. One might think it's much ado about nothing, as we are not aware of any online shop that charges fees for bank transfers or direct debits. For Paysafecard, with its approximately 15% fees, the situation would be quite different if the draft law is expanded. Either the online shop waives 15%, increases prices across the board for all customers, or removes Paysafecard.

We inform our commercial customers at the end of the year so that they can make adjustments on time by January 1, 2018, if necessary.