43% of Shoppers Walk Away When BNPL Isn’t Available. Here’s What That Means for Your Store.
Buy now, pay later has moved well past checkout. New research shows it now shapes where shoppers browse, what they buy, and whether they finish a purchase at all, and merchants who treat it as an optional checkout feature are paying for that decision in abandoned carts.
PYMNTS Intelligence research conducted with PayPal found that 43% of consumers abandon a purchase entirely when BNPL is unavailable. Another 42% pick a cheaper product instead. Those two figures together mean that when a shopper arrives at your product page without seeing a financing option, there is a better than even chance they either leave or downgrade their order.
Where You Place It Matters As Much As Whether You Offer It
The research makes a distinction that most merchants have not acted on yet: shoppers are now factoring payment flexibility into their buying decisions while comparing products, not after they have decided to buy. That shift changes where BNPL needs to appear.
Merchants that surfaced Pay Later messaging and buttons on product and category pages rather than waiting until checkout saw a 4.4% lift in overall sales, according to data drawn from PayPal. PayPal's own checkout data puts a higher figure on early placement specifically: merchants who surface Pay Later messaging earlier in the funnel see a 13% lift in PayPal sales, with average order value increasing 91% for BNPL transactions.
The underlying behavior explains why placement produces such a large gap. A shopper browsing a $300 item who sees monthly payment options on the product page thinks about the purchase differently than one who sees the same option only at checkout. The financing option reframes the decision from “can I afford $300 today” to “can I afford $75 a month,” which is a structurally easier question for most shoppers to say yes to.
The Friction Problem That Undermines the Whole Thing
Offering BNPL does not automatically translate to BNPL conversions. The research found that 79% of consumers have abandoned a BNPL checkout at least occasionally because of unnecessary friction, including lengthy approval processes, confusing payment terms, and repeated data entry.
That figure deserves attention. A shopper who arrives at checkout intending to use BNPL and then abandons because the process is slow or confusing represents a different kind of lost sale than one who never saw a financing option at all. They were ready to buy. The execution failed them.
The most common causes of BNPL checkout abandonment in the data are long approval waits and having to re-enter information the platform should already have. For merchants evaluating BNPL providers, frictionless approval speed and pre-filled customer data are meaningful differentiators, not cosmetic features.
Who Uses BNPL and How Much
The PYMNTS data, supported by an Experian survey of 1,002 consumers from October 2025, shows BNPL adoption doubling from 20% of shoppers who used or planned to use it for holiday purchases in 2023 to 43% in 2025. Usage is strongest among adults 25 to 54, with consumers aged 25 to 34 representing the highest adoption group at nearly one in four people. Those 65 and older show the lowest adoption at just over 5%.
One detail the PYMNTS research adds is the distinction between two types of BNPL users: those who rely on it because cash is tight, and those who use it for payment flexibility and cash flow management even when they could pay upfront. The second group is larger than most merchants assume, and it includes higher-income households. This matters for how you market BNPL on your product pages. Framing it purely as a budget tool leaves conversion on the table from shoppers who are using it strategically, not out of necessity.
The BNPL market itself continues growing fast. Global BNPL market value sits at approximately $48.7 billion in 2026 and is projected to reach $212.2 billion by 2033, at a compound annual growth rate of around 23%.
The Provider Landscape
Klarna holds the largest estimated US market share at 26.2%, followed by Afterpay at 21.9% and Affirm at 19.3%, according to PYMNTS data. An important nuance in newer research: 74% of BNPL users now use two or more providers, up from 68% a year earlier. Shoppers are not loyal to a single BNPL option the way they might be loyal to a credit card, which means offering one provider and assuming you have covered the market understates the opportunity.
For Amazon sellers, Amazon's existing partnership with Affirm handles BNPL at the platform level, so the primary lever there is product pricing strategy rather than BNPL placement. For Shopify sellers and DTC brands, the placement findings from this research are directly actionable. Moving BNPL messaging from the checkout page to product and category pages is a configuration change, not a rebuild, and the revenue data suggests it is one of the higher-return optimizations available right now.
The Risk Side of the Equation
BNPL's growth comes with a credit risk picture worth understanding. Past-due payments among BNPL users ranged from 23.2% to 27.5% between April 2024 and January 2025, according to PYMNTS. The global BNPL default rate sits at roughly 1.8 to 2%, low in absolute terms but rising alongside adoption volume. As a merchant, these defaults land on the BNPL provider rather than on you, since providers pay merchants upfront. The risk to watch is provider financial stability in a market where several mid-tier players are under pressure, and consumer perception if BNPL becomes associated with debt distress rather than payment flexibility.
Some BNPL providers have started reporting repayment history to credit bureaus, which could change both consumer behavior and regulatory attention over the next year. Staying aware of how your chosen provider handles this is worth monitoring, particularly if you sell to younger shoppers for whom these reports could affect their broader credit profiles.
