Accepting Afterpay as a merchant
Afterpay splits a purchase into instalments while paying you up front, and is strongest in Australia and New Zealand where it originated. In the United Kingdom and parts of Europe the same proposition operates under the Clearpay brand. What you are buying is credit risk transfer and conversion, not payment processing.
What the fee is actually for
Afterpay assumes the receivable and the credit decision on your customer, and pays you the full order value immediately. The fee reflects that risk plus the working capital, which is why it sits well above card acceptance. Comparing it to a card rate is therefore meaningless. The right comparison is against the incremental revenue it generates from customers who would otherwise not have bought.
The substitution problem
Some customers choosing instalments would have paid immediately by card or bank transfer. That volume is revenue you already had, now carrying a materially higher fee, and every merchant offering buy now pay later has some of it. Judging the method on overall conversion rather than on incremental conversion is the most common and most expensive error in this category.
Australia: the surcharging asymmetry closes on 1 October 2026
The Reserve Bank of Australia’s March 2026 Conclusions Paper removes surcharging on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa from 1 October 2026. In its reasoning the RBA noted that this enables four-party card networks to compete on a more level playing field with higher-cost payment methods that do not allow surcharging, including some buy now pay later products. For an Australian merchant, that means the cost comparison between cards and instalments changes at the same moment your ability to recover either from the customer disappears.
Which payment provider supports Afterpay?
Zeller in Australia, alongside Adyen, Stripe and Cybersource, all document Afterpay, among others, as do most major gateways in the relevant markets. The useful questions are the fee as a percentage of order value, when you are paid, how returns and disputes are handled, where it appears in your payment selector, and what share of orders moved off a cheaper method after it was switched on.
Reviewing what this costs you
What you pay is set in your agreement, not by the scheme. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or put your own volume through the PSP Upside Calculator, because this is the method where the distance between a negotiated rate and a standard one is widest.
Relevant markets: Australia, New Zealand, United States, Canada
