Interestingly I, kind of, have the opposite problem, so to speak.
I recently moved to a foreign country, admittedly an "easy" western European country, and I fully expected my credit cards to start refusing more or less every transaction. Not so. Not a single transaction has been delayed, or denied.
I travel back and forth my home country and my new home semi-regularly with no issues with using my credit cards. I'm not sure this is a good thing either.
Which "easy" western european country are you in? Credit cards are extremely uncommon in many western european countries. They really only exist here so we can make international payments, primarily to US-based companies. Everything is debit card based.
France: PayPal, Carte Bancaire. Most closely resembles the US credit card system. But it seems the french use their local debit accounts to make payments.
Belgium: PayPal, BanContact (any local bank debit accounts)
Netherlands: iDeal (any local bank debit account)
Germany: PayPal, SOFORT (local bank debit accounts)
TLDR: In EU for online purchases, you want to have an PayPal + local debit account to cover most purchases. For interrnational payments, you can have a credit card for those extremely rare cases where vendors only accept credit cards.
I recently moved to a foreign country, admittedly an "easy" western European country, and I fully expected my credit cards to start refusing more or less every transaction. Not so. Not a single transaction has been delayed, or denied.
I travel back and forth my home country and my new home semi-regularly with no issues with using my credit cards. I'm not sure this is a good thing either.