Buy now, pay later has expanded well beyond electronics and apparel, moving into food delivery and grocery checkout as regulators take a closer look at how fees are disclosed and who ultimately pays them. In the U.S., the shift is increasingly visible on major grocery-ordering platforms including DoorDash and Instacart. What remains harder to measure publicly is whether the convenience of installment payments for some shoppers is contributing to higher grocery costs across the system.
DoorDash, Instacart and Klarna have pushed BNPL deeper into grocery checkout
The clearest recent milestone came on March 20, 2025, when DoorDash announced a partnership with Klarna that lets U.S. customers pay in full, split purchases into four interest-free installments, or defer payment later on eligible orders. DoorDash said the options would be available for groceries, retail purchases and even DashPass annual plans. That move added one of the country’s largest delivery platforms to a grocery BNPL market that Instacart had already entered through Klarna and PayPal Pay Later.
The scale of the broader BNPL market is no longer small. In its December 2025 market report, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said six major lenders reported a combined 53.6 million consumers who took out at least one BNPL loan in 2023. The same report said the number of loans made by those lenders rose 23% from 2022 to 2023, while inflation-adjusted loan volume increased 26%.
What is not publicly broken out in detail is how many of those transactions were grocery orders, or how much merchants pay per transaction when shoppers use installment products on food purchases. The companies have confirmed the checkout options are live, but they have not released a public accounting showing whether related payment-processing or merchant costs are absorbed internally, charged to retailers, or reflected in item pricing and service fees seen by all users.
The impact is national, but the clearest pressure points are in online grocery delivery
This is not a story tied to one city or one state. The pressure is national because grocery delivery platforms operate across the country, and DoorDash said in February 2026 that more than 50,000 stores nationwide accepted SNAP or EBT payments on its platform. Instacart, in announcing its Klarna partnership, said it works with more than 2,200 retail banners and nearly 100,000 stores across more than 15,000 cities in North America.
For shoppers, the most visible cost issue may not appear as a line labeled “BNPL fee.” Instead, regulators are focusing on the full checkout stack: item markups, service charges, delivery charges and variable fees that can make online groceries materially more expensive than in-store baskets. In an April 24, 2026 announcement, the Federal Trade Commission said it was opening a rulemaking inquiry into unfair or deceptive fee practices in online food and grocery delivery services nationwide.
The FTC said some grocery delivery orders can end up 30% to 50% more expensive than shopping in-store for the same items, and it specifically asked whether platforms clearly disclose when item prices differ from in-store prices. The agency has not said BNPL itself is causing those increases. It has, however, said hidden, inconsistent or last-minute grocery fees can distort competition, and it has cited prior enforcement actions against Instacart and GrubHub over delivery pricing disclosures.
Regulators and researchers say the concern is less about one fee than the cumulative cost structure
The direct evidence available so far points to a layered cost problem. The FTC’s food-delivery rulemaking notice said consumers often face higher item prices on platforms in addition to fees and charges, and that those price differences are not always apparent before checkout. That matters because BNPL is being introduced inside systems that already carry delivery markups, platform commissions and service fees.
Consumer finance researchers are also raising a separate warning about who uses BNPL for food. In its August 2026 Consumer & Community Context report, the Federal Reserve said BNPL users who relied on the product for groceries or food delivery were more likely than other BNPL users to face late-payment charges or incur overdraft or non-sufficient-funds fees. The CFPB separately says many BNPL loans do not charge interest but most do charge late fees if payments are missed.
For customers, that means the practical effect may show up in two places at once: at checkout through higher delivery-related costs, and after checkout through repayment penalties for borrowers. What is still not publicly known is the exact share of grocery platform costs tied specifically to BNPL adoption. But as installment payments become a standard option for essential food purchases, federal regulators are signaling that the total price of groceries ordered online, not just the headline basket price, is likely to stay under scrutiny.