> People in Europe don't use credit cards offline.
What? Of course we do. If anything, Europeans are less likely to use credit cards online (though that is slowly changing), instead opting for bank transfers or online debit cards.
Here in The Netherlands you basically can't use credit cards for offline purchases. Everyone uses the European debit cards with chip/pin. The fees are very low too, it's cheaper to process than cash is.
If your customers are from Europe, it's not some, but most customers that don't have a credit card. Credit cards are uncommon here (probably hard to imagine if you are from USA).
Online payments are a fragmented mess in Europe. Most countries have their own preferred online payment method (like iDEAL or bancontact), Paypal is basically the only reliable method that works everywhere.
I don't know about Europe, but in the US, offline payments with regular credit cards are/were a thing.
In the old days, you could use an imprint machine to run the card, and mail in the charge slip. Raised numbers and imprint machines are uncool now, but they lasted a long time as backup in case the terminal wasn't working or the power was out.
As far as I know, most US cards include the metadata for offline charges, where the terminal processes transactions in bulk, but there's more risk for merchants than doing an online transaction.
Stored value cards are popular in transportation, where speed is important, fault tolerance is required, and connectivity is intermittent. But even for gift cards, it's more common to use the card as an identity token, and get the value from an online ledger; it makes alternate uses much simpler.
The European payments landscape is much, much different:
1. Because they make less money on cards and card networks are controlled by pushy American corporations, European banks actively campaign against the use of cards online. So instead of feeling confident in Zero Fraud Liability as they are here, consumers in Europe are scared of getting hacked.
2. In some countries, banks don't even print the card number on the card, so you can't use them online if you want to.
3. Cards do not have rewards, so there's much less incentive to use them, even if they could.
4. As a result, consumers are accustomed to using "bank buttons" which let them log into their bank site to push a payment.
5. But that becomes really complex when you have more than 6 banks in a market, so solutions like SOFORT simplify by creating a centralized bank button.
In short, Americans value rewards and convenience whereas Europeans value security. There have been several ACH-based online payment efforts in the US (eBillMe, Mazooma, Noca, etc.) and all have failed.
If you mean you use credit cards for buying stuff online, then no: that is not what we do here. I'm not sure about all of the EU, but at least in NL the majority of online transactions use payments directly with your normal checking account at your bank using a system called iDeal (see https://www.ideal.nl/en/ ).
In 99% of the places I can use my credit card I can also use my debit card, online or offline (well, except in Germany with their EC cards and stuff) that's the relevance of my point...
In most countries in Europe people don't really use credit cards. I only have a credit card because I travel outside Europe a lot (and want to pay online where proper payment solutions like iDeal or even PayPal are not supported).
Even when I travel outside I can use my Maestro card (tied to my bank account) 90% of the times, my credit card is more for backup purposes.
In my country (the Netherlands) you'll have a hard time paying for stuff with a credit card, most shops only accept Maestro cards and NFC payments through your phone. Though most ATMs do support credit cards. More and more shops start to not take cash anymore (expensive to handle).
I personally don't like credit cards since they are about as insecure as you can design a payment system (imo).
EDIT: I meant the insecurity of using credit cards for online payments.
Well yeah, paying with a credit card in physical stores is rare in Europe (and usually considered very strange). People use debit cards or cash (the distribution between these varies per country). I've seen Americans try to pay with a credit card in a supermarket in the Netherlands and have it fail. It probably works more often now, but don't expect it to work everywhere.
People in Europe tend to only use a credit card for online purchases outside of their own country; most people don't have a credit card at all. Online purchases tend to be done with national systems like the Dutch IDeal (this even works with large international shops like Amazon and Steam).
You can only pay online with debit cards if you use two factor authentication in Europe (eurozone). It's basically free though (cash is more expensive to handle), unlike credit cards.
Credit / Debit cards are the same thing online. We, as is USA people, use the terms interchangeable often. I'm going to guess that most EU people have some form of banking card. So we will continue to assume that people have a form of payment other than cash.
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