Buy-now-pay-later is coming to Clover checkout. Should you turn it on?

The short version

Klarna and Fiserv (Clover’s parent company) struck a deal to bring buy-now-pay-later directly into Clover’s checkout flow. It started with an initial rollout to around 100,000 Clover locations, with a broader rollout across Clover devices following in 2026. When it’s live on your device, a customer paying with a card can choose to split the purchase into interest-free installments instead of paying the full amount at once, right there at the point of sale, no separate app required.

It’s not a feature every business needs. But for anyone selling higher-ticket items, furniture, appliances, equipment, services with big invoices, it’s worth understanding before a customer asks for it.

How it actually works at the counter

At a participating Clover terminal, BNPL shows up as a payment option alongside debit and credit, the same way tap-to-pay or a gift card does. The customer picks it, Klarna runs a quick approval check, and if approved, Klarna pays the merchant close to the full amount up front, minus a fee. The customer then pays Klarna back over time, typically in installments spread over a matter of weeks, often with no interest if they pay on schedule.

For the merchant, the transaction settles basically like a normal card sale. You’re not extending the credit yourself and you’re not waiting on the customer to pay you back over time, that risk sits with Klarna. What you’re paying for is the convenience of offering it and the fact that it can close a sale a customer might otherwise walk away from.

Who pays for it

The customer doesn’t pay interest if they stick to the schedule, that’s the point of the “interest-free” pitch. The cost lands on the merchant, in the form of a transaction fee charged on top of your normal processing cost. BNPL providers across the industry typically charge merchants a percentage of the sale plus a small flat fee per transaction, and that fee tends to run meaningfully higher than a standard card-present rate because the provider is taking on approval risk and absorbing the cost of offering interest-free terms to the customer.

Exact pricing depends on your Clover setup and processor agreement, so if you’re considering turning this on, ask specifically what the per-transaction cost is and how it compares to your blended rate today, not just the headline “interest-free for customers” pitch.

A worked example

Say you sell a $900 patio set and a customer uses BNPL instead of walking away to “think about it.” A typical BNPL fee in this space runs somewhere around 5-6% of the sale plus a small flat fee, well above a typical card-present rate of 2-3%. On a $900 ticket, that’s roughly $45-$55 in fees instead of $20-$30 you’d pay on a standard card swipe, a difference of about $25-$30.

If that option is the reason the customer bought today instead of putting it off, or bought the $900 set instead of the $500 one because the payments felt smaller, the extra $25-$30 in fees is cheap compared to losing or shrinking the sale entirely. If the customer would have paid full price on a regular card anyway, you just gave up $25-$30 for nothing. The feature only pays for itself when it’s actually changing the customer’s decision, not just subsidizing sales that would have happened regardless.

When it’s worth turning on

Your business	Worth considering?
Average ticket under $50 (coffee shop, quick-service restaurant)	Usually not, the fee eats into thin margins for little behavioral upside
Average ticket $150-$2,000 (furniture, appliances, specialty retail, equipment rental)	Often yes, BNPL is proven to lift conversion and average order size at this range
Service businesses with large invoices (contractors, dental, veterinary)	Worth testing, especially where customers already ask about payment plans
High competition from online retailers that already offer BNPL	Worth matching, since customers increasingly expect the option

The honest tradeoff: you’re giving up a few extra points of margin on the transactions where someone uses it, in exchange for sales you might not have closed at all, or a bigger cart than they’d have paid for outright. Whether that trade is worth it depends on your margins and your average ticket, not on whether the feature is trendy.

Before you flip it on

Ask your processor or Clover rep for the exact fee schedule, confirm how refunds and partial refunds are handled when a sale was split into installments (it’s more complicated than a normal refund), and check whether it shows up as a distinct line on your settlement reports so you can actually track whether it’s paying for itself. Turn it on for a month, watch the data, and decide from there rather than guessing.

If you’re still deciding what Clover hardware fits your business in the first place, see our comparison of the Clover Flex, Mini, and Station.

Sources: Payments Dive, “Klarna, Fiserv ink Clover BNPL deal”, Banking Dive coverage of the Klarna-Fiserv-Clover partnership.