One-click checkout as the entry point for BNPL growth in Europe
The Zip acquisition of Twisto is corporate news, but buried inside it is a more useful signal for online merchants: the single biggest driver of BNPL adoption in Central and Eastern Europe has been a frictionless, one-click payment experience, not instalment financing per se.
Twisto founder Michal Smida makes this explicit. In markets where credit card penetration is low and cash on delivery was the default fallback for consumers worried about online purchase safety, what converted shoppers was simplicity. A payment flow that removed steps, removed cognitive friction, and removed the need to enter card details repeatedly. The BNPL wrapper gave merchants a credible trust signal; the one-click UX is what actually closed the sale.
For Dutch and Belgian merchants, this is directly relevant. The Netherlands and Belgium sit at opposite ends of the payment-method familiarity spectrum, with iDEAL dominance in the north and a more fragmented landscape in the south, but both markets share one characteristic: checkout abandonment driven by perceived complexity. Shoppers who encounter multi-step payment flows, repeated credential entry, or unfamiliar redirect pages drop off. BNPL providers have succeeded partly because they engineer around that friction by design.
The broader implication is that merchants evaluating BNPL should assess it as a checkout UX decision, not just a credit product decision. The question to ask is not only whether your customers want to pay later, but whether the BNPL integration you choose delivers a measurably smoother checkout than your current default method. If the flow adds steps rather than removes them, the conversion benefit disappears.
Twisto’s experience in cash-heavy markets also reinforces a point worth repeating: trust signals embedded in the checkout, such as deferred payment as implicit quality assurance, can reduce abandonment independently of the financing angle. That is a checkout design lever, not a financial product feature.
Source: twistopay.com
