Ecommerce in Germany poor success rate

[ssalive]

Thanks in advance for any discussion this might bring. The online community that surrounds web development is amazing!

I run a Drupal-based site from the US that is translated into German and conducts e-commerce in Germany. We use Ubercart on this and other sites and are generally happy with it. We use Paypal and Moneybookers (we successfully jumped through all their hoops) for gateway services, as they were the only ones we could find that would serve us without us having a local business address in Germany, and had modules that would interface with Ubercart. What we have found is that both gateways have a terrible success rate of processing transactions in Germany. It doesn't make sense that this is the best the industry can do. An exceedingly high number of our purchasers have gone to each of the gateway service hosted pages and submitted their transaction information only to have the transactions fail. I don't know all the reasons why, I just see the listings of orders that are left without a payment transaction ID. Some of our users have tried up to six times before a transaction would complete. Most give up before then.

In response to the high failure rate, we added a direct bank transfer method, where after initiating an order through our cart system, users could get our account information for a German Deutsche Bank account, and enact an offline transaction. We've found a surprising number of users initiate an order this way, but never complete the offline transaction. It's obvious that having a workable online processing method would be best, but we haven't found a reliable one.

So the question is, does anyone else have this experience? Does anyone know a better gateway service for German transactions that will work with Ubercart?
Thanks again for any help.

[SENtelligence]

Unfortunately, I don't have an answer to your question. But I'd recommend you to ask the same on Abakus, it has a great German-speaking community. http://www.abakus-internet-marketing.de/foren/index.php Or perhaps here - http://sin-forum.de/ecommerce/

[ssalive]

Thanks for the tip! I'll follow up on this.