Majority Will Rely on Financing for BFCM Despite Discounts

Millennials are the most likely among the four generations to resort to financing with credit cards or Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) schemes for this year's Black Friday and Cyber Monday purchases, while only 55 percent of Baby Boomers will likely resort to these tactics to take full advantage of discounts offered by e-commerce platforms and retailers. This data stems from a Deloitte consumer survey conducted in October 2024. Among all financing methods surveyed, credit cards were the most popular at 53 percent respondent share.

Despite shoppers planning to stretch their budget either by paying at a later date or shouldering more credit card debt, the survey results suggest that average per-consumer spending will increase to $650 for the period between Thanksgiving Thursday and Cyber Monday. This spending expectation is seemingly unaffected by the multiple crises like the war in Ukraine and the coronavirus pandemic influencing the world's economy; since 2019, spending has increased at a compound growth rate of almost ten percent per year.

While annual credit card payments have shot past 50 billion transactions in 2022, schemes like BNPL have only recently become popular. According to Worldpay's 2024 Global Payments Report, BNPL was utilized for five percent of domestic e-commerce payments in the U.S., up three percentage points from 2020. Out of the 41 countries and territories surveyed, BNPL was especially popular in Sweden, Germany and Norway with e-commerce purchase shares of 21, 21 and 15 percent. Sweden ranking as highly is unsurprising, since Klarna, one of the premier BNPL providers, was founded in 2005 in Sweden's capital of Stockholm.