They make money from people’s mistakes and/or desperate situations.
As in: if a customer doesn’t pay one of the payments exactly on time they turn into loan sharks with “penalties” vastly exceeding the loan price.
They’re not “hoping the customers pay it back”, it’s almost the opposite - they want people to miss a payment or two and end up paying way more than the actual loan.
This is how they make money. It’s the only way they make money. The Maths of their business model don’t work out if people don’t make mistakes and thus don’t end up paying penalties.
So they have a huge incentive to do everything they can to make it easy to get into their scheme (hence they treat sellers well so that going through them as a payment option is as seamless as possible), to make it more likely that customers make mistakes and to make it hard or even impossible for customers to leave that scheme without going through the full minefield: they’re basically enshittifying the seller’s website, making it similar to providers with subscriptions who make it hard for people to cancel those subscriptions.
It’s really not worth it to get into that shit as a customer and, if people who get stung by those practices also blame the seller, it’s probably not also not worth it for a seller selling low value items as it might add but a handful of sales from the few customers that do need a loan for that, whilst damaging their own brand name by being associated with what are basically modern loan sharks.
This is how they make money. It’s the only way they make money.
That is not correct. Klarna is functionally a payment processor, like an advanced type of credit card, and charges the merchant fees per transaction. For example, see here. They are highly cagey about specific fees until you actually sign up, and it depends on region and business size. But interchange fees are where the majority of their revenue comes from. To my knowledge, the fees are typically 3 percentage points above what the merchant would pay for a credit card transaction.
The reason merchants still accept Klarna despite the high fees is of course, improved conversion rates and decreased risk. Klarna assumes all the risk of the customer not paying, the shop gets all of the money instantly and doesn’t have to worry about it for the most part. That mainly makes it attractive for high margin shops that don’t mind spending lots on marketing to get a few extra sales (fashion, perfume, high end electronics).
I’m not too knowledgeable on how Klarna deals with late fees, but I’m pretty sure it differs per country they operate in. Many places have regulations limiting the abuse of late fees. I wouldn’t be surprised if the US is not that kind of place, and people who are late get fucked with fees.
In general, I agree with the second part of your comment and I do not recommend using any buy-now-pay-later kind of scheme, because you’re taking on additional risk for no real reason. Lots of stuff can happen even through no fault of your own (check engine light? Job downsizing?) that will affect your expected future income.
I forgot that when I read about it, it was also mentioned they got payment processor fees.
As for the way they handle late fees, the article I read was about the US (somebody posted an article about it here in Lemmy not that long ago) and indeed some other countries limit that sort of thing in general, so it should apply the same to this kind of operation.
They make money from people’s mistakes and/or desperate situations.
As in: if a customer doesn’t pay one of the payments exactly on time they turn into loan sharks with “penalties” vastly exceeding the loan price.
They’re not “hoping the customers pay it back”, it’s almost the opposite - they want people to miss a payment or two and end up paying way more than the actual loan.
This is how they make money. It’s the only way they make money. The Maths of their business model don’t work out if people don’t make mistakes and thus don’t end up paying penalties.
So they have a huge incentive to do everything they can to make it easy to get into their scheme (hence they treat sellers well so that going through them as a payment option is as seamless as possible), to make it more likely that customers make mistakes and to make it hard or even impossible for customers to leave that scheme without going through the full minefield: they’re basically enshittifying the seller’s website, making it similar to providers with subscriptions who make it hard for people to cancel those subscriptions.
It’s really not worth it to get into that shit as a customer and, if people who get stung by those practices also blame the seller, it’s probably not also not worth it for a seller selling low value items as it might add but a handful of sales from the few customers that do need a loan for that, whilst damaging their own brand name by being associated with what are basically modern loan sharks.
That is not correct. Klarna is functionally a payment processor, like an advanced type of credit card, and charges the merchant fees per transaction. For example, see here. They are highly cagey about specific fees until you actually sign up, and it depends on region and business size. But interchange fees are where the majority of their revenue comes from. To my knowledge, the fees are typically 3 percentage points above what the merchant would pay for a credit card transaction.
The reason merchants still accept Klarna despite the high fees is of course, improved conversion rates and decreased risk. Klarna assumes all the risk of the customer not paying, the shop gets all of the money instantly and doesn’t have to worry about it for the most part. That mainly makes it attractive for high margin shops that don’t mind spending lots on marketing to get a few extra sales (fashion, perfume, high end electronics).
I’m not too knowledgeable on how Klarna deals with late fees, but I’m pretty sure it differs per country they operate in. Many places have regulations limiting the abuse of late fees. I wouldn’t be surprised if the US is not that kind of place, and people who are late get fucked with fees.
In general, I agree with the second part of your comment and I do not recommend using any buy-now-pay-later kind of scheme, because you’re taking on additional risk for no real reason. Lots of stuff can happen even through no fault of your own (check engine light? Job downsizing?) that will affect your expected future income.
Yeah, you’re right,
I forgot that when I read about it, it was also mentioned they got payment processor fees.
As for the way they handle late fees, the article I read was about the US (somebody posted an article about it here in Lemmy not that long ago) and indeed some other countries limit that sort of thing in general, so it should apply the same to this kind of operation.
Luckily, it seems government are finally getting their acts together to regulate these schemes: https://www.choice.com.au/money/credit-cards-and-loans/personal-loans/articles/bnpl-legislation-passes-parliament
Which means they need to register as credit providers, which is what they are…