Buy now, pay later in the 21st century

For this thesis, I use actual, online payments through all payment methods from four Dutch e- commerce companies offering Buy-Now, Pay-Later (BNPL) payment options for the years 2020 and 2021 to investigate the effect of paying with short-term zero interest instalments on consumer spending behaviour. This research is new as online payments data are not publicly available, and the impact of credit was extrapolated from previous research using credit card payments or based on consumer surveys. The anonymised payment data was enriched with demographic statistics based on postal code data obtained from the Central Bureau for Statistics. For the quantitative analysis, OLS regression in combination with the Lasso shrinkage method was applied. This initial study into new credit trends was restricted to the geographical spread of the data and selected product categories. The study provides real evidence, for the first time, that BNPL payment methods provide similar stimulants as previous forms of consumer credit and have similar characteristics to other traditional forms of credit.