German sellers can charge PayPal users extra fees

Whether e-retailers can charge customers who use PayPal or Sofort as payment methods has always been unclear. At the end of March this year, the German Federal Court BGH made a final ruling on this issue, allowing merchants to charge additional fees.

This is the first time a federal court has clarified whether merchants are allowed to charge additional fees for certain types of payment methods. Prior to this, it had not clarified the situation for PayPal and instant payment transfers.

Two years ago, the Consumer Information Center filed a lawsuit against Flixbus, a Munich long-distance bus company, for charging customers an additional fee based on the fare when they used instant transfer or PayPal to pay.

The German Anti-Unfair Competition Protection Agency believes that this behavior affects the interests of consumers and market participants and competitors, and violates the Anti-Unfair Competition Law. At the same time, it also violates Section 270a of the German Civil Code, which prohibits merchants from charging additional fees for the use of certain cashless payment methods.

But the Munich Higher Regional Court rejected the case filed by the Consumer Advisory Center . Now, the appeal to the German Federal Supreme Court has also failed.

Germany's Federal Supreme Court ruled that the additional fees were not charged for using this transfer method, but for activating corresponding payment services , such as a credit check on the customer.

The merchant therefore provides the service before receiving the payment and Section 270a of the German Civil Code does not prohibit charging additional fees for additional services.

According to the ruling of the German Federal Supreme Court, merchants are free to decide whether to charge customers additional fees for using the service.

Following the BGH ruling, merchants can now theoretically charge consumers for using these two online payment services. However, in practice this rarely happens and therefore has little impact on consumers.

In addition, for various considerations, Flixbus finally cancelled the additional charges for these two payment services.

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