ZipC61
BNPL Network · Consumer retailers with discretionary baskets big enough that instalments change the decision and gross mar…
Overview
$44
Best for: Consumer retailers with discretionary baskets big enough that instalments change the decision and gross margin wide enough to absorb a mid-to-high single-digit commission — fashion, footwear, beauty, homeware, jewellery, sporting goods, consumer electronics accessories. It suits merchants who want to test BNPL against a known price rather than enter a negotiation, and merchants already on Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento 2 or Salesforce Commerce Cloud, where switching Zip on is a plugin rather than a project. The virtual card route also makes Zip unusually easy to trial for anyone with a custom checkout, because it needs no back-end work.
Strengths
- + Zip publishes a merchant rate — 5.9% plus 30 cents on the Standard plan — which makes it the only large US BNPL network you can price without entering a sales process.
- + It also publishes the settlement window, which almost nobody in this category does: Zip states it settles the merchant in full for an order, minus its fees, within two to three business days.
- + Chargeback liability is set out in public. Zip says it primarily assumes chargeback risk, and names the exclusions — merchant conduct, the goods themselves, non-delivery, late delivery and transit damage — rather than leaving them to the contract.
- + No monthly or annual fee. Zip's own pricing page states the commercial model is purely transactional, so a merchant that sells nothing on Zip pays nothing.
- + The merchant is paid up front and Zip carries the credit and non-payment risk on approved orders, so an instalment plan the shopper abandons is Zip's loss rather than a clawback.
- + Virtual Card Checkout lets a merchant accept Zip through the payment integration it already has, with no back-end API work — the lowest-effort BNPL trial available anywhere.
Trade-offs
- – 5.9% plus 30 cents is the highest published headline rate in mainstream US buy-now-pay-later, roughly double the cost of taking the same sale on a card, and Zip's own page describes it as 'starting at'.
- – Refund economics are the one commercial term Zip does not publish. Nothing on the merchant pricing page says how much of the 5.9% comes back when an order is reversed — and in a category with a 30% return rate that clause outweighs the headline.
- – No reserve policy is published either, so whether Zip holds back a share of settlements against future losses, and how it is released, is a question for your own agreement.
- – The virtual card route — Zip's easiest integration — means the transaction arrives at your checkout as an ordinary card payment, so your own processor's rate can land on top of Zip's commission. Model the combined cost, not the Zip number alone.
- – Standard-plan support is Monday to Friday, 9:00am to 5:00pm. Round-the-clock support, an SLA and a named account manager are reserved for the custom enterprise tier.
- – No merchant contract length, notice period or termination fee is published, so the term you are agreeing to is whatever the merchant agreement says.
Fees in detail
- Online rate: 5.9% + 30c on the published Standard plan; enterprise pricing is custom.
- Disputes: Zip states it primarily assumes chargeback risk. Its published exclusions are the ones that matter: it is not responsible for chargebacks ar
Standard published rate for a domestic online card payment. Confirm current pricing on Zip's pricing page.
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