Klarna Uses BNPL for Acquisition

Klarna’s real product is not installment credit, it is a repeat shopping relationship that starts at checkout and expands into discovery, rewards, and advertising. BNPL gets a shopper to create an account at the exact moment they are ready to buy, then Klarna uses the app to bring that shopper back to browse stores, track orders, and click merchant offers, turning a one time loan user into recurring commerce traffic and data.

• For merchants, the first reason to add Klarna is simple, higher conversion on expensive baskets. A former merchant partner described Klarna as easy to justify because retailers can directly measure checkout lift, repeat purchase behavior, and whether full price items sell faster before markdowns.
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• Klarna has steadily built the shopping layer on top of lending. By 2024, it was driving roughly $10B of annual GMV through its shopping destination app, and by March 2025 it said 33 million active consumers opened the app each month, creating a real media and discovery surface for merchants.
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• This is where Klarna differs from Affirm. Klarna’s 2024 model was a lower ARPU, sub $100 average order value consumer app funded by merchant subsidized BNPL, cash back, ads, cards, and subscriptions, while Affirm stayed closer to a high ticket financing utility embedded in partners like Shopify and Adyen.
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The next stage is Klarna acting less like a lender and more like a retail distribution network. As more revenue comes from ads, cards, subscriptions, and bank products, BNPL keeps functioning as the cheapest on ramp, because every financed checkout can become another logged in shopper that Klarna can monetize across many purchases instead of just one loan.