How s.Oliver made ecommerce payments work at scale

Here are the questions worth asking now

1. After checkout, where do your customers go?

The payment completes, the order is confirmed – and then what? If your BNPL provider has its own consumer app, its own marketplace, or its own shopping destination, there’s a reasonable chance your customer is being redirected there.

This isn’t just a theoretical concern: Several major BNPL providers have built consumer ecosystems that depend on keeping shoppers engaged on their platforms, surfacing other brands, other deals, other reasons to spend. The checkout is the entry point; your customer becomes their customer.

Riverty, however, has no consumer marketplace. No competing shopping destination, no reason to redirect your customers anywhere other than back to you. The relationship your customer has at checkout stays with your brand.

For fashion merchants, where brand loyalty is hard-won and easily disrupted, this matters more than most providers will volunteer.

For beauty merchants, where repeat purchasing depends on a consistent, trusted brand experience, this should be examined closely.

2. Who owns the data generated at your checkout?

Every transaction generates data. Purchase behaviour, product preferences, spend patterns, return rates all create a detailed picture of how your customers shop. The question is, what does your BNPL provider do with it?

Some providers use merchant checkout data to inform their own consumer-facing products. They may use it to reach your customers with competitor advertising, to build consumer profiles for their marketplace, or to refine targeting for other brands in their ecosystem. So the data generated at your checkout, by your customers, essentially powers someone else’s business model.

Riverty does not run a consumer marketplace; it does not use merchant checkout data to compete for your customers’ attention elsewhere. The data that flows through your payment experience remains in service of your business relationship, not someone else’s growth strategy.

In an environment where first-party data is increasingly valuable – and increasingly difficult to protect – it’s worth knowing exactly where yours goes.

3. What happens after payment is made?

Fashion

Roughly 39% of BNPL invoices in fashion contain a return. That’s not a problem – it’s a structural reality of the category. But what happens next?

Does your provider handle the return cleanly, automatically reconciling the payment and updating the invoice without requiring manual intervention from your operations team? Or does the complexity land back on your side?

Returns that are handled badly don’t just create operational cost – they erode customer trust at exactly the moment you need it most, when a customer is deciding whether to buy from you again. A clean return experience is a loyalty driver; a complicated one isn’t.

Beauty

When a customer makes three purchases in a month – a routine restock, a seasonal drop, an impulse add-on – do they receive three separate invoices with three different payment timelines, or does your provider consolidate them into a single, clear payment experience? Invoice fragmentation is one of the leading causes of payment confusion in beauty ecommerce. Customers lose track, reminders feel disconnected from the brand, and the experience becomes administrative rather than effortless. In a category built on repeat purchasing and routine, that friction compounds quietly – until a customer decides it’s easier to shop somewhere else. Payment continuity isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a retention mechanism.

The results

Net acceptance rates rose from 87-90% to 95%. A customer satisfaction survey run after launch returned an average rating of 4.13 out of 5, from a customer base that had high expectations and existing habits. When s.Oliver later brought in other BNPL providers, Riverty’s customers stayed. On the operational side, Riverty now holds the highest checkout share at s.Oliver and generates the fewest customer service contacts – not the lowest rate, but the lowest number. Download the full case study for the complete picture, including how the partnership was structured and what the rollout looked like in practice.