Do BNPLs Actually Pay Off? Stripe’s Data Says Yes
When Mixtiles’ head of product, Yuval Shwager, asked whether offering buy now, pay later (BNPL) options would create checkout friction or siphon off existing card transactions, he was raising a question that applies to any merchant weighing premium-priced payment methods. BNPLs now account for more than $300 billion in global transactions, but the data needed to judge their ROI—checkout click-through rates, conversion rates, refunds, and disputes—is rarely available in one place.
With over $1 trillion in annual processed volume, Stripe is in a position to run controlled experiments at scale. To answer these questions, the company designed an A/B test across more than 150,000 global payment sessions. In each session, a single BNPL (Affirm, Afterpay, or Klarna) and at least one other payment method were eligible for display. Half the checkouts showed the BNPL in the payment method section; the other half did not. The test covered B2C businesses across all industries that qualify for BNPL.
Net-New Sales, Not Just Method Switching
A frequent objection to adding BNPLs is that customers will simply swap from lower-cost cards to installment payments, increasing transaction costs without growing revenue. The experiment found the opposite: more than two-thirds of BNPL volume came from net-new sales, meaning those purchases likely would not have happened if the BNPL option weren’t shown.
Revenue Lift Tied Directly to a Single Checkout Change
Merchants often hesitate to alter their payment flows without knowing the financial consequences. The test isolated one variable—displaying a BNPL at checkout—and found it could drive up to a 14% increase in revenue for eligible sessions. That gain came from two effects: more customers completed purchases, and those who did spent more on average.
Conversion Gains Span the Order-Value Spectrum
There’s a common belief that BNPLs only matter for big-ticket retailers. The data shows that’s only half right. Businesses handling higher-value orders between $500 and $1,500 saw the strongest conversion lift, but merchants across the entire order-value range saw improved conversion rates when a BNPL was offered.
For Mixtiles, the findings were enough to move forward. Shwager noted that after adding three BNPL methods to the checkout page, the company saw thousands of dollars in increased revenue within weeks. Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite can surface eligible payment methods dynamically, and merchants can also run their own payment method A/B tests, control payment method availability, and manage BNPLs and other options directly from the Dashboard.
