E-commerce’s New Backbone: How Finance and Fulfilment Are Rewiring Online Retail
In just a few years, the business of selling online has shifted from “run a webshop and ship parcels” to something far more integrated. Today, the most successful platforms are quietly turning themselves into financial and logistics infrastructure for thousands of merchants and millions of shoppers.
Two pillars emblematise this shift: inventory financing for sellers, and Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) for buyers. Together they form a tightly connected system that determines who grows, and who is left behind in the next phase of e-commerce.
Funding the Seller: Embedded Inventory Finance on Marketplaces
E-commerce inventory financing flips the traditional small-business credit model on its head. Instead of a merchant going to the bank with a business plan and collateral, credit comes embedded in the marketplace where they already sell.
Platforms like Allegro in Central Europe, Amazon and eBay globally, Flipkart in India and Mercado Libre in Latin America have all built versions of the same idea: use marketplace data to underwrite and distribute working-capital loans directly to merchants.
In Poland, Allegro’s Merchant Finance offers sellers a revolving credit line of up to roughly PLN 150,000, provided not by Allegro itself but by partner lender PragmaGO. Eligibility and pricing are based on real transaction history: past turnover, customer ratings, return ratios. Merchants apply within their seller dashboard, get a credit decision within minutes, and receive funds within hours or a couple of days. Repayment is largely automated: instalments are deducted from future payouts Allegro owes to the seller.
Allegro pushes the model further on the B2B side with Allegro Pay Business: corporate buyers can pay with 30-day terms, while the merchant still gets paid up front thanks to PragmaGO’s financing. The platform thus finances both sides of the transaction — one more way to keep business locked into its ecosystem.
Amazon Lending, launched in 2011, follows a similar pattern. Selected Marketplace sellers receive personalised offers based on their performance; loans are disbursed quickly and repaid directly from future Amazon payouts. eBay’s Seller Capital programme, initially with LendingPoint and later other partners, gives eBay merchants access to flexible credit with repayments linked to marketplace sales.
In India, Flipkart’s Growth Capital programme connects more than 100,000 sellers with around ten banks and non-banking financial companies. Integrations via API mean a seller can request and receive a loan in as little as 48 hours, often at relatively competitive rates by local standards. In Latin America, Mercado Libre’s fintech arm, Mercado Pago, has become a major lender to small businesses that might never have qualified at a traditional bank. For many SMEs, the first formal loan of their lives arrives not from a branch manager but from a marketplace dashboard.
The logic is the same everywhere. For merchants, these products bridge the gap between “pay suppliers now” and “get paid later”, allowing them to build stock ahead of sales peaks, buy larger batches at better prices, or test new product lines. For banks and fintechs, marketplace integration lowers acquisition costs and improves risk management: they see real-time data and have built-in repayment through platform flows. For marketplaces, better-financed sellers mean more stock, more sales and fatter GMV.
Funding the Buyer: BNPL Becomes a Standard Checkout Option
If inventory financing oils the wheels on the supply side, BNPL does the same on the demand side. “Buy Now, Pay Later” lets customers split a purchase into a few smaller instalments, usually interest-free as long as they pay on time. The merchant pays a fee to the BNPL provider that is higher than standard card fees, but in return gets higher conversion and bigger baskets.
Globally, BNPL has grown from a niche Swedish innovation into a mainstream payment method. In some markets, such as Sweden, nearly a quarter of online transactions now run through BNPL schemes. Young adults in particular have embraced the model, but the habit is spreading across age groups and product categories — from electronics and fashion to even groceries and small everyday items.
The business mechanics are straightforward. At checkout, the BNPL provider pays the full amount to the merchant and assumes the credit risk. The customer then repays the provider in three or four instalments over a few weeks, often without interest. Revenues for the BNPL company come mainly from merchant fees in the 4–6 per cent range, and to a lesser extent from late fees or interest on longer-term products.
Credit assessment is highly automated and data-driven. Instead of lengthy bank applications, customers undergo real-time, “soft” checks that do not immediately affect official credit scores. Acceptance rates are high, but providers impose caps on total exposure or number of concurrent BNPL purchases. Using machine learning and alternative data, major players such as Klarna have managed to keep default rates surprisingly low compared to credit cards, aided by the fact that most BNPL purchases are for small sums and short durations.
The funding behind these products varies. Klarna, with a banking licence in Sweden, can draw on deposits and capital markets. Others, such as Affirm in the United States, work with partner banks and securitise loan portfolios, selling them on to institutional investors. Rising interest rates after 2022 made this funding more expensive and forced BNPL companies to cut costs, adjust fee structures and tighten underwriting — a reminder that the model’s profitability is sensitive to macro conditions.
On the front end, BNPL has become deeply embedded in the e-commerce experience. European fashion platforms like Zalando and Otto, Polish marketplace Allegro, and Scandinavian retailers all report higher conversion and larger orders when BNPL is offered. Global giants have moved as well: Amazon partners with Affirm in the US and Barclays in the UK; Shopify integrates Affirm’s “Shop Pay Installments” for hundreds of thousands of merchants; PayPal has rolled out its own “Pay in 3/4” across many markets to its existing user base, processing tens of billions of dollars in BNPL volume annually.
Even classifieds-style platforms are experimenting. In Pakistan, OLX’s OLX Mall introduced instalment options via Bank Alfalah’s credit card system, letting cardholders split larger purchases into six interest-free payments while the marketplace still gets paid up front. For an economy with large untapped e-commerce potential, such partnerships can be powerful growth levers.
Hungary is no exception to the trend, albeit on a smaller scale for now. Local BNPL-style players such as milpay (formerly IzzyPay) and InstaCash work with webshops to offer interest-free instalments at checkout, sometimes under the merchant’s own brand. International solutions like Klarna’s “Pay in 3” have become accessible via payment gateways such as Stripe. Banks, meanwhile, are pushing their own online store-loan products — OTP, MBH Bank and Cofidis all allow consumers to initiate traditional consumer loans directly from checkout.
On the B2B side, solutions like PastPay give corporate clients 15–90 days of deferred payment while paying merchants immediately, essentially BNPL for companies. Hungarian webshops from electronics specialists to sports and mobility retailers increasingly advertise instant, fee-free instalments, often backed by these new fintech intermediaries.
As BNPL grows, so do the concerns. Easy access to small, short-term credit can encourage over-spending, and many users only discover the true costs when late fees hit. Regulators are catching up: in the European Union, the revised Consumer Credit Directive will bring BNPL more squarely under credit rules, forcing providers to strengthen credit checks and disclosures. Profitability is another pressure point. Years of “growth at all costs” are giving way to consolidation, with weaker players being bought or exiting the market, while larger firms experiment with new revenue streams and “super app” strategies.
A Single System: How Finance and Fulfilment Lock in Platforms and Merchants
Viewed together, inventory financing, and BNPL are not separate services but parts of one platform-scale operating system for e-commerce.
On the supply side, marketplaces use their data to decide which merchants to fund, how much inventory they should carry and on what terms. On the demand side, the same or linked fintech infrastructures decide which customers can split payments and how aggressively to promote BNPL.
The more of these layers a platform controls or integrates, the stickier it becomes. A merchant that stores goods in Amazon’s warehouses, uses Amazon Lending for working capital and depends on Amazon’s BNPL partnerships for conversion has little incentive — and often little ability — to move elsewhere. Even when services are provided by external partners, the marketplace remains the orchestrator.
For smaller, independent webshops and local marketplaces, this is both a threat and an opportunity. Competing with Amazon or Temu on price alone is hopeless; competing on experience is difficult without matching their financial and logistics stack. That is why so much innovation in countries like Hungary is now focused on building local equivalents: fintechs embedding BNPL and B2B credit at checkout, and banks experimenting with digital SME lending that plugs directly into e-commerce flows.
What is clear is that the era of the “simple webshop” is over. The future of e-commerce belongs to those who can combine capital, and risk data into one coherent model — whether they sit in Seattle, Stockholm, São Paulo or Budapest.