Accepting Klarna as a merchant

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 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.

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.

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.

What you pay is set in your PSP contract, not by the scheme. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or run the payment set-up check on your own site, because this is the method where the distance between a negotiated rate and a standard one is widest.

Relevant markets: Europe, United States, Australia