Evolving Klarna adds AI, creator and expert links, plus easy resale

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Apr 26, 2023

On its 18th anniversary, BNPL giant Klarna is continuing to roll out new features in the UK with the latest being linked to AI, personalisation, product discovery and resale.

Its new app has launched an AI-powered, personalised shopping feed and a new design “to combine the smartest shopping and financial management tools, all in one place”.

Meanwhile Creator Shops has been introduced to help consumers “browse and buy a collection of their favourite creators' product recommendations”. 

And the company will soon introduce the Ask Klarna personal shopping assistant “to connect consumers with real experts for product advice via the Klarna app”. It’s also adding a Resell functionality – a way to sell pre-owned items through secondhand marketplaces, “with the help of pre-filled listings”.

It’s all reflective of the potential that new technology offers, as well as showing how consumers now expect much more than an instalment approach to payments from their BNPL providers these days. And of course, in a much more competitive environment for the whole BNPL ecosystem, added-value features that mean consumers are more likely to stay with a single service provider make good commercial sense.

Klarna, which now has over 150 million customers via 500,000 retailers globally, sees itself as more than just a payments solution provider.

Its app’s new discovery shopping feed is powered by Klarna’s own in-house-developed AI product recommendation engine, and “enables consumers to scroll through highly personalised product recommendations, helping them find and shop the items most relevant to them. No two feeds are the same, with real-time updates and deals that become increasingly tailored as it learns more about the user’s preferences”.

Meanwhile Creator Shops reflects a growing number of consumers using social media as their primary source of shopping inspiration, “but finding products can be challenging with content dispersed across channels”. It gives “its growing creator network the ability to launch their own storefronts on Klarna.com. Creators can recommend products from thousands of brands, share shoppable video and photo content, and invite followers to visit their personal shop from their social channels”.

The company said that by being able to include links to every item, “creators can increase their affiliate revenue from a single post on any social media platform, by enabling their followers to click through to their shop and buy”. And soon, creators will be able to share this content “to millions of shoppers in the Klarna app for extended reach”.

The other new features come on the back of recent research that shows 78% of consumers would like a service where they can speak with product experts to get more information about items when shopping online. And more than a third of consumers say they’re more likely to resell an item now compared to one year ago. 

The new Ask Klarna “will provide consumers with on-demand access to shopping experts, via chat or video calls from within the Klarna app and at Klarna.com". Together with their personal shopper, consumers will be able to find items across thousands of brands, stores and products in the luxury sector, “with this innovation soon expanding to more verticals”.

And the Resell feature “will speed up the process of creating listings on secondhand marketplaces by pre-filling product details and images”. To sell a past Klarna purchase, consumers simply tap on the ‘Resell’ button next to an item from their order history, and they’ll be automatically taken to a participating re-commerce platform.