Biggest buy now, pay later (BNPL) apps in Netherlands 2015-2023, based on downloads
The Netherlands' BNPL market has increasingly been overtaken by Klarna - nearly reaching one million downloads in 2023. What stands out here is that the Netherlands is one of the few countries in Europe where the Swedish payment app received more downloads than the PayPal app. PayPal, generally speaking, is not the most used method to pay for online shopping within the country - although the source does not clarify whether it included cross-border e-commerce in its numbers, as Dutch consumers do sometimes shop online in Chinese web stores. It is unclear whether the PayPal download figures come from Dutch shoppers trying out BNPL options or from them purchasing more from abroad. A special note on a specific brand: Up to 2022 people often confused that Australia's Afterpay is active in the Netherlands. This was not the case, as this concerns a Dutch company called AfterPay - with a capital P, founded in 2010, taken over by Germany's Bertelsmann - which also happens to be active in BNPL and credit services. Potentially due to this confusion with its Australian counterpart, the Dutch/German AfterPay changed its name in 2022 to "Riverty is the new AfterPay".