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.

Substitution

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.

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.

Scope

Which of your deferred options the rules actually reach

Not everything called buy now pay later moves into scope on the same terms, and the line the directive draws is worth knowing before you decide what stays in the checkout.

The directive carves out credit in the form of a deferred payment that is free of interest and without any other charges, apart from limited charges borne by the consumer for late payment, where the consumer pays within 50 days of the delivery of the goods or services and no third party is involved in offering the credit. For large online suppliers of goods and services that window narrows to 14 days, so the carve-out cannot be used at scale to step around the protections.

Read the last condition closely. A third party offering the credit takes the arrangement outside the exclusion, and a buy now pay later provider is a third party. The products you buy from a provider therefore sit inside the regime, while a deferral you extend yourself, interest free and settled inside the window, sits outside it. Who carries the receivable was already a working capital decision. From November it is a regulatory one as well.

Creditworthiness

The decline you have not budgeted for

The creditworthiness assessment moves from a commercial decision to a legal obligation. It has to be proportionate and carried out in the interest of the consumer, on the basis of necessary and relevant information about income and expenses, and it may not draw on special categories of personal data or on information taken from social networks.

The practical consequence for you is a number nobody currently reports. A share of the customers approved today will be declined once the assessment is done to that standard, and the decline lands at the payment step, which is the most expensive place in the funnel to lose an order.

What turns that into a managed line rather than silent leakage is the fallback. Show a declined customer a cheaper immediate method, clearly and without making them start again, and the order survives on better economics than it began with. Show them nothing and the order is gone, and it never appears anywhere as a payment cost. That path is worth designing before November rather than after the first month of numbers.

Disclosure

A new step in a flow built to have none

The appeal of a buy now pay later button is that it is short. The directive adds to it. Pre-contractual information has to reach the consumer in good time before the agreement is concluded, and explicitly not at the same time as conclusion, free of charge, on the Standard European Consumer Credit Information form.

In good time and not at the same moment is not a panel you can fold into the confirmation click. It is a separate step in a flow that was designed around not having one, and where that step lands in your checkout is a conversion question before it is a compliance one.

The advertising rules travel with it and reach further than most merchants expect. Anything on your own pages that presents an instalment amount is credit advertising, so the product templates showing a monthly figure come into scope alongside your provider’s marketing. Whoever owns those templates belongs in the conversation now.

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.

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