But doing so has always been more confusing for me compared to “regular” payments with a credit card anywhere else, and has on overall been a negative experience for me.
I really don’t understand why anyone would prefer to use them at all.
What am I missing? Can anyone help me understand?
Once someone comes to their checkout they hide or at least make the direct payment options well hidden so that by default people buy by taking credit with them.
This credit often comes with shorter than industry standard payment terms so people end up missing payment and being handed over to their in-house collection agency that starts collecting overdue fees.
It's considered digitalized loansharking by many for a good reason.
Ironically it seems that for many smaller e-tailers using Klarna as the payment option seems to heighten the trust of customers so they're more likely to buy (my guess is that we've all been told or told people historically not to enter CC details on random sites and even with stuff like 3D-secure these days everyone is wary)
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/nov/17/klarna-buy-now...
It's Payday Loans 2.0.
It's really disturbing to see Klarna as a payment option in many Dutch online shops. These always already have iDEAL (which the vast majority of customers use), a convenient way of doing an electronic bank transfer; and most shops support credit cards too.