It's true, I haven't bought from Amazon in years. Usually bol.com is my first stop for that kind of stuff. But if it's really a lack of iDeal support that's holding Amazon back, why don't they just support iDeal?
I doubt iDeal is much harder to support than other payment systems, so the only reason not to support it is because they don't really consider Netherland an important market. I don't care about Amazon ignoring us, but I'm a bit disappointed about Lego.
And you know, good old bank transfers worked perfect decades before that too. Still do in fact. Even Europeans from certain (Eurozone) countries seem wary to use it, while typing in am IBAN is really not anymore work than typing a credit card number.
To be clear: when I have to input cc info, I’m less likely to use an e-commerce site. IDeal makes me more likely to use other websites bc it isn’t so hard to pay. That’s why it breaks Amazon inertia.
In the Dutch e-commerce context, that’s less like breaking Amazon inertia and more like breaking Bol.com inertia.
Either way, we never had credit cards in the Netherlands (they exist, but aren’t popular). The predecessor to iDEAL was the paper ‘acceptgiro’ [1]. The big difference there is that that was a postpaid scheme (you’d receive the acceptgiro along with your goods, fill and sign it, and send it to your bank to be processed).
I doubt iDeal is much harder to support than other payment systems, so the only reason not to support it is because they don't really consider Netherland an important market. I don't care about Amazon ignoring us, but I'm a bit disappointed about Lego.