Accepting Oney as a merchant

Paiement en plusieurs fois is an established French retail expectation, particularly at higher basket values and in categories like furniture, electronics and travel. That maturity matters commercially: French consumers are not being introduced to instalments, they are choosing between merchants who offer them well and merchants who do not offer them at all.

Instalment methods earn their fee disproportionately at higher order values, where the alternative is genuinely no purchase rather than a purchase on a different method. At low basket values the substitution rate rises and the economics deteriorate quickly. Setting a sensible minimum order value for instalment presentation is the single cheapest control available, and most merchants have never set one deliberately.

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.

France is where that lands hardest, and not because the rules are different there. It is because paiement en plusieurs fois is not a promotional add-on in a French checkout; it is a normal way to buy a sofa. When a mainstream purchase behaviour becomes a regulated credit product, the volume affected is not a niche at the edge of your reporting. It is a visible share of your French revenue, at exactly the basket values where instalments are worth the most to you.

The part most merchants underestimate is the advertising side rather than the acceptance side. Instalment messaging in a French catalogue does not live only in the payment step. It sits on category pages, on product pages, in price displays and in campaign creative, and all of that is your copy rather than your provider’s. Two questions are worth asking before the date rather than after it: what your provider expects acceptance to do on your own customer profile, and which of your existing pages carry instalment messaging that will need to change.

What you pay is set in your agreement, 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: France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland