BNPL adoption grows in US as merchants brace for fraud

By Puja Sharma

• Around 40% of merchants say BNPL increases fraud risk, including those who already offer it
• About 19.1% of merchants currently accept BNPL, with Klarna and Affirm the most widely supported providers among those surveyed
• Merchants cite higher fraud risk as the leading reason for not adopting BNPL, ahead of business model fit and order value concerns

Buy now, pay later has spent the past five years rewriting how consumers think about purchasing. Split a purchase into instalments, spread the cost and take the product home today. For shoppers, the value is immediate and obvious, however, for merchants, the calculation is considerably more complicated and new research from Chargebacks911, a global leader in dispute resolution and chargeback management, suggests the post-transaction implications of BNPL remain widely underestimated.

The 2026 Chargeback Field Report, based on proprietary survey data from more than 250 merchants, finds that 40% of merchants, including those who already offer BNPL at checkout, believe these platforms increase fraud risk. Among those who have chosen not to adopt BNPL, concern over higher fraud exposure is the single most commonly cited reason, ahead of business model misalignment and average order value considerations.

“BNPL has done something genuinely impressive at the checkout,” said Monica Eaton, Founder and CEO of Chargebacks911. “It has made a complex financial product feel frictionless. But friction does not disappear and simply moves, meaning for a growing number of merchants, it is showing up in their dispute data long after the purchase felt seamless.”

Approximately 19.1% of merchants surveyed now accept BNPL, with Klarna the most widely supported provider at 35% of BNPL-accepting merchants, followed by Affirm at 27%. But adoption and confidence are not the same thing. Nearly four in ten merchants across the board, whether or not they currently offer BNPL, identify it as a potential driver of fraud and dispute activity. BNPL introduces another layer of complexity into dispute environments that many merchants already struggle to manage.

A conventional card dispute follows an established network process. BNPL adds another party, another set of processes and another layer of responsibility for merchants to understand. The checkout may feel simpler to the consumer, but the post-transaction journey can become considerably harder for the merchant to see and manage.

“Merchants are adopting BNPL to meet consumer demand and improve conversion,” said Eaton. “Those are legitimate business reasons. But adopting a new payment method without understanding how disputes work within that method is like installing a new checkout system without testing what happens when something needs to be returned. The purchase journey gets optimized but the often the post-transaction journey does not.”

Chargebacks911’s Unified Dispute Management System (UDMS) uses AI and machine learning to give merchants visibility across dispute activity regardless of payment method, identifying patterns in BNPL-related disputes that would be invisible when each case is reviewed individually and enabling merchants to understand how post-transaction complexity is evolving across their entire payment mix. ResolveLab supports that with continuous performance measurement, tracking how dispute volumes and outcomes shift as payment method adoption changes over time.

“Merchants that manage this most effectively are those who treat BNPL operationally and not merely as a checkout decision,” said Eaton. “What is your dispute exposure? What do your dispute volumes across BNPL transactions actually look like compared to your other payment methods? If you cannot answer those questions, you are accepting complexity without the visibility to manage it.”