Payments, the silent CX heartbeat

When Klarna beat Affirm to become the exclusive provider of buy now, pay later loans through OnePay at Walmart in the US in March 2025, its co-founder and chief executive, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, called it "a huge vote of confidence."

The agreement placed Klarna's lending product before Walmart's millions of weekly US shoppers, both online and in store. But the more telling story lay in what the arrangement revealed about Walmart's financial-services strategy.

For decades, Walmart has competed by making everyday shopping easier: lower prices, broad choice, and convenience at scale. Now it is applying the same philosophy to financial services, bringing products together under one recognizable brand.

Of course, few merchants will build their own OnePay, nor should they. But what Walmart's story points to is a broader shift in how retailers understand payments: from a point at which a merchant hands a customer over to a bank or lender, to a central part of the customer experience.

Payment is the final test

If marketing creates expectation, product design creates desire, and fulfillment and service decide whether the promise holds after the sale, then the moment a customer decides to pay is the largest test of it all.  

Mike Farrell from FreedomPay, on a recent Nuvei's Everywhere Commerce podcast episode, called it a "trust event."  

"Payments should be treated as more than a cost center to be minimized: they are a critical trust event, particularly when customers are sharing sensitive financial and card information."

Nuvei's How America Pays study found that 38% say payment options influence how they view a brand, and 41% have a strong or exclusive preference for paying the same way for most purchases. A polished product page cannot compensate for a method a customer does not use, and a strong brand cannot fully overcome an avoidable decline, a clumsy authentication step, or a demand to re-enter card details. Customers read these not as technical faults but as the merchant making a purchase harder than it needs to be, and 37% say they would be inclined to abandon the purchase if their preferred method were missing.

The task, of course, is not to offer every method, but to know which ones matter to which customers in which markets. A broad partner such as Nuvei supplies the reach, with more than 720 payment methods; but the strategic work is still selection and fine-tuning to customers' needs and behaviors.

Built, not bought

The apparel retailer Everlane had built its own ecommerce platform and had the engineering capability to maintain it. Yet at the final step, shoppers still entered card and address details by hand. Rather than replace the platform, Everlane added Shop Pay as an accelerated checkout. Within 30 days it carried 15% of the retailer's US transactions, according to Shopify, with the largest gains among new and previously unconverted shoppers, and Shopify reports checkout conversion rising by as much as 70% at its peak.  

The same logic applies in media. For a publisher such as Business Insider, persuading a reader that an article is worth paying for is only part of the job. The reader must also be able to subscribe without being pulled out of the moment by an unnecessary form or an unfamiliar process. Its checkout supports major cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, reducing the need to enter payment details manually on mobile.  

None of this requires a merchant to become a bank, a processor, or a fintech. It requires the judgment to know what good looks like, the will to hold a provider to it, and the habit of treating payments as part of the customer flow.

The capability worth owning

What do the merchants who treat payments as part of their customer experience do differently? In my view, there are three main differences.

The first is ownership.

The best merchants treat checkout as a product with its own team, rather than a technical integration managed only when something goes wrong. That team, usually bringing together product, payments, data, risk, and finance, tracks the full funnel: which methods customers select, where they abandon, which issuers decline, how often 3DS creates friction, and whether fraud controls are blocking legitimate buyers.

The second is to configure checkout around the customer's context, not only the merchant's convenience.

That means making the right payment methods visible by market, device, and basket: putting Apple Pay or Google Pay ahead of a card form on a compatible phone, offering local payment methods where customers expect them, and using tokenized stored credentials to spare returning customers from re-entering their details. A soft decline may warrant a carefully timed retry or a different acquirer; a false decline points to a fraud rule that needs adjusting; an expired stored card can often be recovered through network tokens or account-updater services.

The third is to run payments as a continuous test program.

The best merchants compare the effect of reordering payment methods, changing an authentication flow, offering an express wallet, or routing a specific transaction cohort differently.

What merchants can learn from Walmart

Like anything else in the business, payments improve when someone is accountable for asking, repeatedly and in detail: where are legitimate customers failing, and what can be changed to let them buy?

Walmart did not set out to become a lender or to run the rails itself. What it decided was that the payment moment sits too close to the brand to be handed to someone else's defaults.

The question I would put to any revenue leader is this: when a customer reaches the point of payment, does anyone inside the business own what happens next?

For the merchants pulling ahead in 2026, the answer is yes.