Germans love bank transfers as a method of payment, It’s almost compulsory to offer bank transfer as a payment option if you’re serious about trading in Germany but Apple are bucking the trend and just dumped it.
To understand the German love affair with bank transfer you have to go back to the dawn of the Internet. Germany had a digital (ISDN) telephone network which meant that while we Brits were fiddling about with our 14.4 and 28.8 baud dial up modems over a PSTN network, Germans were enjoying midband 64k or 128k data connections. This meant that they were onboard with online banking before we’d even got so far as discovering Yahoo! Germans could do Internet banking and the likes of PayPal hadn’t even got going.
Now that Germans have PayPal and online credit and debit card payments are the norm, Apple appear to have taken the decision not to pander to the German penchant for pre-payment by bank transfer and quietly removed the option from their website. In truth Apple are doing Germans a favour as the pre-payment method delayed shipment of any order until the funds had cleared – not a problem with PayPal or card payments.
Apple Pay is of course not yet available in Germany, it’s somewhat amusing to know Apple are trying to compete with PayPal but are forced to offer it as a payment option in lieu of their own alternative.
