[mtrimpe]

As Auguste mentioned already, it's all about lacking direct debit for international customers.

I'm from the Netherlands and if you're a freelancer here you need to provide income statements for 3 years before you can get a credit card.

That meant that until last year I couldn't buy a thing with Google Wallet or Amazon Payments without asking my family for a credit card.

The only thing that worked for me was PayPal (and the iTunes store.)

[kalleboo]

> I'm from the Netherlands and if you're a freelancer here you need to provide income statements for 3 years before you can get a credit card.

That's amazing. Also goes to show anyone who tries to talk about "Europe" is making a useless generalization - here in Sweden I easily got two credit cards when I was a student with no income aside from government student loans.

But don't you have VISA/Mastercard debit cards? In Sweden, there are no longer any ATM cards, everyone gets a VISA or MasterCard instead that works in ATM, stores and online.

[mtrimpe]

You can get a MasterCard debit card while you're a student here as well, which most people get to keep after college.

If you didn't apply or it gets revoked because you were flagged somehow, which happened to me when moving abroad for a year, you end up in the situation I described.

And no, we are still pretty much exclusively ATM based here.

[Daniel_Newby]

They won't even give you a secured credit card, one backed by a cash deposit?