Accepting Klarna as a merchant
Klarna is a suite rather than a method. Pay now, pay later and instalment financing sit behind one integration and one button, and they carry very different economics. Enabling Klarna without deciding which of those you actually want is how a cheap bank transfer quietly becomes an expensive credit product.
What you are actually paying for
With deferred and instalment options you are buying credit risk transfer and conversion, not payment processing. Klarna assumes the receivable and pays you; the fee reflects that risk and the working capital. Comparing it to a card rate is therefore the wrong comparison. The right one is against the incremental revenue it generates and, where relevant, against what carrying that credit yourself would cost.
The substitution problem
The single most common failure with buy now pay later is substitution: customers who would have paid immediately on a cheaper method choosing the deferred option because it is presented first or most prominently. Every merchant offering it has some of this, and almost none measure it. The way to judge Klarna is not overall conversion but conversion among customers who would otherwise have abandoned. That distinction is the entire business case.
SOFORT has been absorbed into Klarna Payments
The standalone SOFORT bank transfer product has been consolidated into Klarna Payments, where the equivalent instant bank transfer appears as Klarna Pay Now. Cutover dates varied by provider because each PSP retired its own integration on its own schedule. The commercial risk is specific: where a SOFORT integration was replaced with the full Klarna suite during a migration, a merchant may now be paying deferred-payment economics on transactions that used to be a cheap bank transfer, visible only as a rising blended rate.
Which payment provider supports Klarna?
Mollie, Unzer, Nexi and Worldline all document Klarna, as does effectively every other provider. Ask instead which Klarna products are enabled in your checkout, what each costs, how they are presented in your payment selector, and what share of orders moved from a cheaper method after Klarna was switched on.
From 20 November 2026 this is regulated consumer credit
Directive (EU) 2023/2225, the second Consumer Credit Directive, repeals the 2008 directive with effect from 20 November 2026, and member states were required to transpose it by 20 November 2025. The exemption for credit repayable within a short period at insignificant cost is removed, which is the exemption interest-free instalment products have relied on. Providers come within the national financial supervision regime, bringing a licence requirement, mandatory creditworthiness assessment, credit register participation, stricter information and advertising rules, and an explicit prohibition on offering deferred payment to minors. Your provider carries the licence, but you carry the consequences: a share of customers approved today will be declined afterwards, and a decline at the payment step is an abandoned order unless a cheaper immediate method is presented well enough to catch it. Stricter advertising rules also reach your own product pages, not only your provider's marketing.
Reviewing what this costs you
What you pay is set in your PSP contract, 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: Europe, United States, Australia
