More insights
Co-founder Briqpay
October 7, 2026 at 07:00 AM
Most Black Friday checkout plans are written for one shopper. Our consumer checkout data from Black Friday 2025 says there are at least four, and they pay in completely different ways.
We compared the payment mix on the Black Friday weekend (Friday 28 November to Cyber Monday 1 December 2025) with each market's own autumn baseline. The direction of the shift, the size of the basket and the payment method that carried the peak were different in every country. With Black Friday 2026 on 27 November, and new consumer credit rules applying a week earlier in most of these markets, the per-market detail matters more this year than ever.
| Sweden, consumer checkouts | Normal autumn day | Black Friday weekend |
|---|---|---|
| Buy now pay later | 42.5% | 48.7% |
| Mobile payment | 30.0% | 24.1% |
| Card | 22.6% | 23.7% |
| Invoice | 3.2% | 2.3% |
| Wallet | 1.7% | 1.2% |
Swedish shoppers moved toward credit. Buy now pay later gained six points, almost exactly what mobile payment lost, and baskets were about 11% larger than on a normal day. Together, buy now pay later and invoice carried 51% of the weekend's consumer checkouts.
That was the 2025 picture. In 2026 credit already carries 53% of Swedish consumer checkouts on an ordinary day, and from 20 November every one of those purchases falls under the new Konsumentkreditlag, with a creditworthiness assessment on each one. Svensk Handel expected Black Week 2025 sales of SEK 10.2 billion, with 57% of Swedes planning to shop, according to Dagens Handel.
What to do in Sweden: treat the pay later slot as the most important element of your checkout, have a second compliant credit provider or a clear fallback to mobile payment ready, and decide what a declined shopper sees next.
| Netherlands, consumer checkouts | Normal autumn day | Black Friday weekend |
|---|---|---|
| Bank transfer | 50.8% | 49.5% |
| Buy now pay later | 11.6% | 17.7% |
| Card | 19.1% | 16.7% |
| Invoice | 10.2% | 9.5% |
| Wallet | 8.4% | 6.6% |
Bank transfer stayed the backbone of the Dutch checkout, but buy now pay later had the biggest relative jump of any market: from 11.6% to 17.7%, taken mostly from card and wallet. And unlike Sweden, Dutch baskets got smaller, about 18% below a normal day. Dutch shoppers used pay later to spread the cost of many smaller discounted purchases, not to afford bigger ones.
Thuiswinkel.org found that 58% of Dutch Black Friday shoppers buy during Black Friday week, and only 3% wait for Cyber Monday. The Netherlands is also the market where the consumer credit rules are least settled: the Dutch implementation of CCD2 was still before parliament at the end of September, so Black Friday 2026 will most likely run on today's rules there. Our CCD2 country guide tracks the status.
What to do in the Netherlands: keep bank transfer first, make sure pay later is visible and fast for small baskets, and plan for the rules to change after peak season rather than before it.
| Germany, consumer checkouts | Normal autumn day | Black Friday weekend |
|---|---|---|
| Wallet | 59.5% | 62.8% |
| Card | 19.9% | 17.3% |
| Invoice | 12.7% | 9.6% |
| Buy now pay later | 7.9% | 10.3% |
German shoppers did something no other market did: they moved toward wallets, which went from 59.5% to 62.8%. Invoice, a German favourite on a normal day, lost three points, and buy now pay later gained two. Basket size did not move at all. The German Black Friday shopper buys the same basket, faster, with whatever is already saved on the phone.
The German retail federation HDE forecast EUR 5.8 billion in sales over Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2025, the first decline it has ever forecast, with 48% of shoppers planning to buy on Black Friday, according to its November 2025 forecast. In a flat market, the merchants who keep the checkout frictionless take share.
What to do in Germany: put wallets first on mobile, keep invoice available but do not lead with it on the peak weekend, and check whether your own Rechnungskauf terms still fall outside the new credit rules from 20 November.
| United Kingdom, consumer checkouts | Normal autumn day | Black Friday weekend |
|---|---|---|
| Card | 76.3% | 78.5% |
| Wallet | 16.9% | 15.9% |
| Buy now pay later | 5.7% | 5.0% |
| Invoice | 1.0% | 0.7% |
British shoppers went the other way: card gained share on Black Friday and buy now pay later slipped. Baskets were about 5% smaller than normal. For a UK checkout, the Black Friday question is not which method to add but whether every card payment gets through. That is where local acquiring matters: an EU card acquired in the UK is a cross-border payment, declined more often and charged five to six times the interchange.
What to do in the UK: focus on card approval rates, by card country, and have a fallback route for declined cards rather than another payment method nobody uses.
Denmark was too small a sample on the 2025 Black Friday weekend to report, but the ordinary-day picture for 2026 is clear: card and wallet carry 84% of Danish consumer checkouts on our platform and credit only 4%. The new Danish credit rules apply from 20 November too, but for most Danish checkouts the Black Friday priority is the same as in the UK: card and MobilePay approval rates.
Put the four markets side by side and the pattern is hard to miss:
| Black Friday 2025 vs a normal day | Sweden | Netherlands | Germany | UK |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biggest gainer | BNPL (+6.2 pts) | BNPL (+6.1 pts) | Wallet (+3.3 pts) | Card (+2.2 pts) |
| Biggest loser | Mobile payment (5.9 pts) | Card (2.4 pts) | Invoice (3.1 pts) | Wallet (1.0 pt) |
| Basket size | +11% | -18% | unchanged | -5% |
The wider market shows the same split. In the US, Adobe measured more than USD 1 billion of online spending through buy now pay later on Cyber Monday 2025 alone, up 4.2% on the year before, while in our UK data pay later lost share over the same weekend.
A checkout that shows the same payment lineup in every market is right in at most one of them. The merchants who do best on 27 November will be the ones who decide, per market, which method comes first, which comes second and what happens when one of them fails. That is what a payment orchestration layer is for: the order, the providers and the fallbacks are configuration, so they can be set per country before Black Week and changed during it.
For the hour-by-hour picture and the volume curve, see Black Friday 2026 checkout prep, and for what to do between now and the day, our week-by-week Black Friday 2026 checklist.
Methodology note: Figures are drawn from Briqpay's own consumer (B2C) checkout data, covering completed checkouts with internal test transactions excluded. The Black Friday weekend is 28 November to 1 December 2025; the baseline is an average day from 1 October to 9 November 2025, per market. Denmark uses February to September 2026, as its Black Friday 2025 sample was too small to report. Payment methods are grouped by category (card, wallet, bank transfer, invoice, buy now pay later, mobile payment); we do not name individual providers and we report shares, not volumes. Basket size is the average order value on the weekend compared with the same market's baseline. Only markets with a meaningful sample in both periods are reported.
Card payments acquired in the shopper's own country are approved more often, and between the UK and the EU they can cost five times less. What local acquiring is, what it saves and how to set it up across the Nordics.
CCD2 brings buy now pay later and invoice under consumer credit law on 20 November 2026. What changes at checkout, which countries are ready (the Netherlands and Norway are not), and how exposed each market is, with our own checkout data.
Last year the Black Friday peak started two weeks before Black Week and ran into mid December, and this year a new credit law lands in the middle of it. A week-by-week payment plan built on our 2025 checkout data.
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