Accepting Zip as a merchant

Zip provides buy now pay later and instalment payments, strongest in Australia and New Zealand with a presence in the United States. You are paid up front, Zip carries the credit decision and the receivable, and the fee prices that rather than transaction handling.

Incremental

Judge it on incremental orders, not total conversion

Some customers selecting instalments would have paid immediately by card or account transfer. That volume is revenue you already had, now at a materially higher cost. The method earns its fee only on customers who would otherwise have abandoned, and separating those two groups is the entire business case. It is measurable from checkout behaviour and it is very rarely measured.

Australia: the ground shifts on 1 October 2026

The Reserve Bank of Australia’s Conclusions Paper of 31 March 2026 removes surcharging on eftpos, Mastercard and Visa from 1 October 2026 and lowers domestic interchange caps. In its reasoning the RBA noted this allows four-party card networks to compete on a more level playing field with higher-cost payment methods that do not permit surcharging, which includes some buy now pay later products. So cards get cheaper and the ability to recover any acceptance cost from the customer disappears in the same month. For an Australian merchant that changes the relative case for instalments materially, and it changes it on a known date.

Presentation

Testing the position of the button, properly

Where the method sits in your payment selector, how prominently instalment messaging appears on product pages and whether it is preselected all move the substitution rate. That much is uncontroversial. What is usually missing is a way to find out by how much, on your own traffic, without a data team.

The test that works is a simple one. For four weeks, alternate the position of the instalment option between high and low in the selector, split by a hash of the session so the two groups are comparable, and hold everything else constant. Then compare two numbers between the groups: total completed orders, and the share of completed orders that used instalments.

The interpretation is where the value sits. If instalment share moves a lot and total orders do not, the position is moving substitution and nothing else, which means the prominent position is costing you money on revenue you already had. If total orders move as well, the position is buying incremental revenue and is earning its cost. Four weeks and one configuration switch tell you which of those is happening. Nothing in your payments report can distinguish the two, which is why the question usually stays an opinion.

Returns

A return against a running instalment schedule is three problems, not one

You are paid up front, which is the selling point, and it is also why returns behave unlike anything else in your checkout. The money has already moved, the customer still owes a schedule, and neither of those facts is visible in a returns process that was designed around cards.

Three things have to be settled and they are usually settled by nobody. Timing: how quickly a registered return stops the next instalment, because a customer who is charged after returning the goods contacts you and not the provider. Partial returns: what happens to a four-instalment schedule when one item out of three comes back, and whether the schedule shrinks or the difference is refunded separately. And the refund route: whether the customer is repaid by the provider, by you, or by a cancelled schedule, because those three look entirely different on a bank statement and produce entirely different support tickets.

Get the answers in writing, then test them once with a real order before your peak season rather than during it. The failure mode here is not a lost order. It is a customer who has your goods, has been charged again, and cannot work out who to phone.

Which payment provider supports Zip?

Fat Zebra and Zeller in Australia, alongside Adyen and Stripe, all document Zip, among others, along with the other major gateways in the relevant markets. The useful questions are the fee as a percentage of order value, the acceptance rate on your customer profile, when you are paid, how returns interact with the instalment schedule, and what your minimum order value threshold for showing instalments should be.

October 2026

What 1 October 2026 does to the comparison, in euros

The date above is usually read as news about cards. It is also, and more consequentially, news about every method that competes with cards, which in an Australian checkout means this one.

Numbers. Take 5 million euros of Australian revenue with 20 per cent on Zip, so 1 million euros there and 4 million on cards. Suppose Zip costs 4.0 per cent all-in, so 40,000 euros. Suppose cards cost you 1.3 per cent but you currently surcharge a point of that back to the customer, leaving a net card cost of 0.3 per cent, so 12,000 euros. From 1 October the surcharge is gone. The same card volume now costs the full rate, so roughly 52,000 euros instead of 12,000. The RBA is lowering domestic interchange caps in the same package, so the 1.3 will come down somewhat, but it will not come down by a full point. Call it 40,000 euros a year landing on your margin, in one month.

Two consequences, and they pull in opposite directions. Your net card cost rises sharply, which narrows the gap to instalments and makes them look relatively better than they did. But your total acceptance cost rises across the board, which makes every point of substitution more expensive than it was. The first argues for showing instalments more prominently. The second argues for measuring substitution before you do. Run the measurement in the months before October, because from that date onwards you are deciding against a changed baseline with no clean before to compare it to.

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