The Paypers
Over the past few years, the Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) market has grown significantly – a report released earlier in 2022 projected BNPL to account for 9% of all North American e-commerce transactions and 12% of all European ecommerce transactions. Further, parts of the global BNPL landscape have started to show signs of maturation with the development of vertical-specific BNPL offerings, the acquisition of smaller BNPL players by those with greater market share, and the increasing popularity of whitelabelled BNPL solutions by some retailers. With these trends in mind, considerable media focus has been directed toward the evaluation of BNPL as a usurper of credit cards, or as the new ‘credit card’
of younger generations of consumers. But the true threat BNPL represents to credit cards as a payment method has only been minimally explored beyond vague assumptions and alarmist claims. Thus, the goal of this article is to examine the attractiveness of BNPL as an alternative to credit cards, as well as the extent to which BNPL has been truly embraced as a substitute by consumers.