Top 3 of payment methods per European country

PayPal and VISA dominate the European ecommerce industry. In almost every country in Europe, one of these two is the most popular payment method for online shopping. Only in the Netherlands, the most popular payment method isn’t PayPal or VISA. Let’s have a look at the top 3 per country.

Ecommerce News Europe has gathered the data from Dataprovider, a data crawling company that studied the payment methods offered by over 900,000 ecommerce websites across Europe. “We’ve indexed all these online stores and looked at the different payment methods they offer. But you have to keep in mind there are also less trustworthy shops among the websites we’ve indexed”, Iris Rigter told us.

The top 3 of payment methods per country

“As you can see, there are some countries where the most used payment methods can only be found in about half of online stores”, Iris notes. She is referring to countries such as the Czech Republic, where VISA is used by 45 percent of online stores, MasterCard by 41 and PayPal by 35 percent. “These are countries where consumers use many different payment methods.”

The Netherlands, dominated by iDeal

The absolute dominance of PayPal and VISA in Europe immediately stands out. Only in the Netherlands, neither one of them is offered the most, because iDeal is the unqualified favorite there. Recently, brand owner Currence said iDeal has a market share of 57% in the Netherlands. And research from 2016 shows that credit cards, debit cards or PayPal are way less popular than this Dutch payment method.

Dataprovider also shared with us how the payment methods of all European online stores that are indexed by them are divided. Unsurprisingly, PayPal and VISA are the number one and two, with respectively 72 percent and 54 percent. But maybe even more interesting is the fact Bitcoin (6.3%) is more popular than a popular European payment method like Klarna (3.7%).