> Credit cards are pretty rare in Austria, too. (I blame the banks in part; getting a CC here has been a nightmare for me and has taken over half a year!) Ther

> Credit cards are pretty rare in Austria, too. (I blame the banks in part; getting a CC here has been a nightmare for me and has taken over half a year!) There's also a fee associated with having a credit card here, so unless you use it a lot, it's generally hardly worth your while. Amazon either completely ignores the Dutch market or it doesn't get a foot in the door. amazon.nl redirects to amazon.co.uk. There is a Dutch competitor[1] that's pretty big here. Before iDEAL they just worked around the whole credit card mess by sending bills[2]. > Come to think of it, there must be a substantial market for painless pan-European payment processing. Hmm! Or has this been tried and failed many times before? There has been a very small scare here that a system like that (in the context of the Single Euro Payments Area[3]) might supersede the local iDEAL system by an inferior system. I'm not aware of any previous attempts on pan-European payment systems. There have been some attempts on the Dutch national market before iDEAL, but most of them failed (presumably because if it doesn't have the support of all major banks, the market will end up fragmented). [1] Bol.com [2] The Dutch "acceptgiro", you just fill in your account number (if that hasn't been done already), sign it and send it to your bank. Surprisingly, there isn't an English Wikipedia page for it :-) [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area