As in overall e-commerce, credit cards are clearly the preferred payment method in European online retailing. Their share rose almost 6% year-on-year. Consumers use credit cards to pay for more than eight out of ten purchases in European online retailing.

This is one of the results explained in the Pago Retail Report 2008, which was recently published by Deutsche Card Services, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank. Despite the predominance of credit cards offline payment methods such as invoice purchases and prepayment as well as direct debiting still play a more important role in online retailing than in overall e-commerce. The report highlights that 5.04% of all retail transactions were paid for by offline methods and 11.97% by direct debiting. Their shares in overall e-commerce are only 0.77% and 8.34%. However, offline payment and direct debiting lose ground to credit cards in online retailing.

In contrast to other research, this report of "Purchasing and Payment Behaviour in Online Retail" isn't based on the analysis of polls and surveys, but on a sample of 7.5 million real-life purchase transactions processed through the Pago platform.

Payment Behaviour in Online Retail in few words:

*Offline payment methods and direct debiting lose importance in favour of credit cards

*Consumers from the UK and outside Europe pay almost exclusively by credit card

*Upward potential for new payment methods Maestro and giropay

*Visa increases its lead over MasterCard as top credit card brand

*German men prefer credit cards