Card Payments for Hairdressers in Germany

Here’s the bit nobody mentions when you set up your chair: the card machine charges you for being paid. Every cut, every colour, a sliver disappears to a company that never held the scissors. Small per client. Not small across a full book. Let me show you what that sliver really costs in a German salon, and the way to keep it.

Does a hairdresser even need to take cards now?

Yes, and the numbers are blunt about it. In the Bundesbank’s 2023 payment study, cash slipped from 58% of transactions to 51% in two years, while card payments climbed to 33% and kept rising. Measured by money spent rather than number of payments, the debit card already beats cash, and card payments grew another 11% in 2024.

Card payments for hairdressers aren’t really optional anymore. They’re most of the till. The client in your chair increasingly expects to pay without cash, especially younger clients and walk-ins who never carry notes. A cash-only sign quietly sends them down the street.

What do SumUp, Zettle and Square cost a salon?

The two names you’ll meet first are SumUp and Zettle (now PayPal Point of Sale). Both charge 1.39% per payment, with no monthly fee and a reader as a one-off, roughly €29 to €79 (SumUp, Zettle). Square sits higher for in-person payments at 1.75% on EU cards, per its European pricing.

On a single €40 cut, 1.39% is 56 cents. Feels like nothing. Now run the book. A quiet salon turning over €6,000 a month on card hands across about €1,000 a year. A busy one at €10,000 a month loses roughly €1,670 at 1.39%, or about €2,100 on Square’s 1.75%. That’s a chair’s rent, or a season of colour stock, gone to the rails.

One detail that stings: refunds don’t give the fee back. SumUp and Square both keep their cut even when you return the money, so a refunded €120 colour still cost you. SumUp’s paid plan trims the rate to around 1%, but it adds about €19 a month, so it only pays off above a certain volume.

Can I take payment without buying a card terminal?

You can, and this is the part worth slowing down for. Instead of the client tapping a card that runs through Visa, Mastercard or girocard, they scan a QR code and approve the payment in their own banking app. The money moves bank to bank. No reader on the desk, nothing to buy.

This is how Zahlo works, and it’s also why the fee can be 0%. A card-based provider can never get to zero, because it doesn’t keep the whole percentage. Every card payment pays interchange, a fee the card networks set, plus scheme fees to Visa and Mastercard, plus the provider’s own margin. A slice is already gone before SumUp sees a cent. Account-to-account skips that entire stack. No card network in the middle means no interchange to pass on, so 0% stops being a gimmick and becomes simple arithmetic.

What about no-shows and chargebacks?

Cards come with chargebacks. A client can dispute a payment with their bank weeks later and claw it back, and you carry both the loss and the paperwork. Because account-to-account is the client pushing money to you rather than you pulling it from a card, there’s no chargeback button to press. For a salon dealing with the odd disputed colour or a deposit on a no-show, that’s real calm.

The tidy bonus is reconciliation. Every payment lands already matched to your takings, so closing the till stops being a nightly guessing game.

So what’s the cheapest way for a small salon to get paid?

If you want the lowest cost, full stop, it’s 0%, and that points to a QR account-to-account tool like Zahlo. SumUp and Zettle are the sensible card choice at 1.39% if you specifically want card-tapping. Square is the pricier option at 1.75%.

Here’s the honest catch. With Zahlo your client pays by scanning from their banking app, not by tapping plastic, and a few will still expect to tap. In Germany that’s a softer obstacle than it sounds, since bank transfers are part of daily life and mobile payments have tripled in recent years, but it’s the one thing to weigh. Plenty of salons run it as their main method and keep a backup for the rare card-only client.

The card machine’s little percentage is the quietest cost in the salon, and the one you renew without thinking. Add it up once. If you’d rather keep that money, the 0% route is right there: no terminal, no chargebacks, the full amount in your account, matched and done.

Take payments at 0% with Zahlo →