Payment Processing for German-Registered Companies

• Handelsregister extract, shareholders and managing directors.
• Whether the activity is regulated and therefore needs BaFin authorisation.
• A SEPA-reachable settlement account in the company's name.
• VAT registration and, for consumer sales, a compliant Impressum and terms.

German checkout conversion is closely tied to method availability: invoice and instalment payments, direct debit and account-to-account transfers carry a large share of consumer spend, so a card-only checkout usually underperforms. Confirm which methods a route supports before judging its pricing.

SEPA Direct Debit is widely used but gives the payer a long return window, so providers look closely at return rates for businesses that rely on it. Where invoice or instalment payments are offered, the credit risk usually sits with a specialist provider rather than with your acquirer.

Because much of German consumer spend runs through invoice, instalment and account-to-account payments, the card volume in a German application is often a fraction of total revenue. Underwriting sizes the card programme on the card share, not on group turnover, so state both figures separately: expected monthly card volume, average card transaction value, and the share of revenue you expect to collect by other methods.

This also affects how a chargeback ratio reads. A low card volume makes the ratio move sharply on very few disputes, so a handful of cases in a quiet month can look like a pattern. Work the figure out on the card transactions alone, for the same month, before drawing a conclusion from it.

Your business is classified with a merchant category code, and that four-digit code is what a route's permitted-category policy is applied to. German firms selling several things through one entity, for example a shop plus a subscription plus a marketplace element, are the ones most often classified in a way that does not match what they actually sell, which surfaces later as unexpected limits or a category decline.

• Describe the activity that carries most of the card volume, not the widest description in the Handelsregister extract.
• Where two activities are genuinely separate, expect them to be treated as separate categories.
• Check the code that matches what you sell before an application, so any mismatch is discussed rather than discovered.