BNPL surfaced earlier in the shopping journey drives larger baskets and stronger sales, with 43% of shoppers abandoning a purchase when it’s unavailable, according to PYMNTS Intelligence research with PayPal. Merchants using upstream Pay Later messaging and button placement on product and category pages saw a 4.4% lift in overall sales, drawn from PayPal data. Shoppers increasingly weigh financing while comparing products, with 81% saying they spend more when using BNPL and 42% picking a cheaper option when it’s absent. Execution still decides the payoff, as 79% report sometimes abandoning BNPL checkouts over friction like long approvals and repeated data entry, even as PayPal says 74% of its Pay Later purchases come from repeat buyers.
