Want that $300 North Face now… want to pay for it later. Buy now, pay later companies like Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay help you sport that puffer ASAP and pay in monthly installments. You’ve probably stumbled across BNPL options at digital checkouts, but BNPL companies also have their own platforms to help you discover products and deals from brand partners. Now Klarna has given its site and app a social-friendly revamp:
- Klarna launched TikTok-style shoppable videos (think: snappy makeup tutorials). The feature is already being used by Lady Gaga’s Haus Labs, e.l.f. Cosmetics, and others.
- It also unveiled a “Creator” app for brands and influencers to collab on campaigns.
Hearting the “Holy Hydration” serum… After watching an e.l.f. skincare tutorial, all in the Klarna app. Klarna has 150M users BNPL’ing from its 450K retail partners, but it wants to be more than a payment option on a third-party site like Levi’s — it wants to be a destination. In recent years, social titans have been doing the opposite: trying to be more like shopping platforms.
- TikTok started allowing Shopify merchants to add “shopping” tabs to their profiles and create mini storefronts. It’s also experimenting with live-stream shopping.
- Facebook launched Instagram Shop, letting businesses set up storefronts on their pages to sell products featured in posts.
Social + shopping = synergy… It’s the perfect pairing, but no one has really done it well yet — at least in the US. Social + shopping features are popularly combined on Asian superapps like Alibaba and WeChat. “Social commerce” is predicted to grow 3X as fast as traditional ecomm over the next three years, so whoever makes it work could land a big opportunity.