PayPal has published research ahead of the Black Friday and Cyber Monday peak, warning UK retailers that late disclosure of buy now, pay later options is costing them basket additions. The payments group says nine in ten UK adults are actively managing festive spending, and that visibility of instalment-payment options earlier in the shopping journey can materially shift conversion.

The research, conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of PayPal between 4 and 10 September 2026 among 2,076 UK adults, found that more than half of Christmas BNPL shoppers (55%) would favour a retailer that shows the option on product pages over one that waits until the checkout step, where only 21% said they preferred to see it. Two-thirds (67%) said earlier visibility would make them more likely to add an item to their basket. PayPal also cited its own internal data showing an 11% uplift in PayPal payment volumes among merchants that introduced Pay Later messaging or a second checkout button, though it noted results may vary and the underlying merchant sample dated from March 2020 to September 2025.

The BNPL placement argument

The distinction between product-page and checkout-page disclosure is commercially significant. At checkout, a shopper has already decided in principle to buy; instalment framing at that point reduces friction but does not drive discovery. On the product page, showing a weekly or monthly cost alongside a headline price addresses affordability earlier, when the shopper is still deciding whether to proceed. For higher-consideration purchases, that reframing can be the deciding factor.

UK home fitness retailer JTX Fitness offered a case study in the release. Jamie Forshaw, head of marketing at JTX Fitness, said: “Showing customers their payment options while they’re still browsing can help them feel more confident about how they’ll manage the cost. When customers can see Pay Later from the product page onwards, more of them go from browsing to buying.”

Sean Douglas, senior director of UK Large Enterprise at PayPal, noted that peak season pressure tends to put retailers in survival mode, but argued the data pointed to a more active opportunity: the 11% volume uplift, he said, could be the difference between meeting revenue targets and exceeding them.

Market context and regulatory backdrop

PayPal’s Pay Later sits within a BNPL market that is under active regulatory review in the UK. The Financial Conduct Authority has been developing a framework to bring point-of-sale credit products within the Consumer Credit Act perimeter, a process that has run for several years and is expected to introduce affordability check requirements, clearer pre-contract disclosure rules and new marketing standards. Once the regime is live, the question of where and how BNPL options are surfaced to consumers will move from a commercial optimisation decision to a compliance one.

The broader market for embedded BNPL includes Klarna, Clearpay (Afterpay) and Zilch, each of which also promotes early product-page integration to merchant partners. PayPal’s advantage in this space is distribution: its existing merchant acceptance network and buyer-side login reduce integration friction compared with a standalone BNPL provider. The research release is also a vehicle for directing merchants to PayPal’s Pay Later onboarding page, so the findings should be read in that commercial context.

The AI finding is a secondary data point worth watching. More than a third of respondents (35%) said they had used or planned to use AI for Christmas shopping, and 52% said they would use it specifically to find deals or compare prices. If AI-assisted browsing compresses the product discovery phase, the window in which payment messaging can influence a shopper may shift again, adding further complexity to where in the journey BNPL should appear.

The post PayPal Urges Retailers to Show BNPL Earlier as Black Friday Nears appeared first on The Fintech Times.