All eyes on Buy Now, Pay Later as holidays begin

*Updated on 12/2/2021 with 2021 holiday data

The pandemic accelerated the shift to digital payments for all types of consumer spending, and holiday shopping is a prime example. We’ve also seen increased demand for Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) services on our platform, fueled by the desire for more convenient and flexible payment options from leading BNPL providers that include Afterpay, Affirm, Klarna, Sezzle and Zip Co.—all Marqeta customers.

We reviewed holiday shopping trends on Marqeta’s platform—which processed $60.1 billion in 2020—and found that use of BNPL has grown substantially for Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers over the past two years. The growth of BNPL reinforces our findings in the State of Credit report that consumers are becoming more and more familiar with BNPL offerings and increasing their usage — in fact, our study found that 51% of consumers surveyed have used a Buy Now, Pay Later Service and 59% of BNPL users surveyed would be happy for BNPL to replace their credit card usage.

As more people realized the benefits of BNPL, Marqeta saw BNPL transaction values on its platform increase year over year:

We also looked at transactions on Marqeta’s platform during the holiday shopping season and found that Cyber Monday volumes were higher than Black Friday, which may suggest greater online shopping deals, including via BNPL companies, compared to the more traditional in-store sales on Black Friday. In addition, we found that the delta between Black Friday and Cyber Monday continues to shrink year-over-year, with a 72% increase in BNPL volumes from Black Friday to Cyber Monday in 2019, closing to a 55% increase in 2021. With the rise of digital payments and online shopping since the pandemic, this suggests that retailers are offering more deals throughout the shopping season, less confined to specific shopping windows targeting in-store or online shopping.

Learn more about Marqeta’s BNPL platform solution here.