Member Article

‘Buy Now Pay Later’ (BNPL) services booming in the UK, with web traffic spikes of over 1,200% YoY

Ahead of the festive season and Black Friday, digital intelligence data from Similarweb highlights astonishing growth in the service’s popularity. The data reveals that:

• Swedish-based Klarna, has seen a 45% employee increase YoY between 2020 to 2021, and a nearly 20% increase in page visits MoM in 2021 • The top 7 UK BNPL providers saw sizable increases in web traffic to their websites in 2020 compared to 2019 • BNPL service Laybuy saw the biggest spike in monthly unique visitors, recording an increase of over 1,200% in October 2020

Data from digital intelligence platform Similarweb has revealed that Swedish-based Klarna, which plans to IPO in 2022, has seen a 45% employee increase YoY between 2020 to 2021, and a nearly 20% increase in page visits MoM in 2021.

This data also backs up retail industry projections on the direction of travel for BNPL, with IDC’s 2022 retail trends predicting that, by 2023, 80% of the top 2000 retailers will implement BNPL to improve conversion rates and increase basket size by an average of 25%.

Similarweb’s data also reveals a huge spike in desktop and mobile web traffic to UK ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ (BNPL) services in the past 24 months, relative to pre-pandemic levels.

The data, which was obtained via historical analysis of website visits and unique visitors over time, highlights the online performance, growth and traffic data of some of the most popular BNPL sites in the UK, including: Klarna, Clearpay, Laybuy, Payl8r, Splitit, DivideBuy, Zilch.

In the lead-up to Black Friday sales and the festive season, the figures suggest that BNPL services will play an increasingly significant role in retailer and consumer decisions in the coming months and years as more users flock to the option to delay their payments. With the pandemic forcing many consumers to shop digitally for the first time.

Most notable among those figures are providers Laybuy and Payl8r, who both saw YoY increases in monthly unique visitors well upwards of 400% between October and December 2020.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Similarweb .