In September, Zeba Khan, who runs consumer electronics at Amazon India, shared a telling number. During Prime Day, at least one in five people who bought a smartphone paid in instalments. Four out of five chose no-cost EMI, where the brand or seller covers the interest.
Many of those buyers could have paid in full. They split it anyway because the option was free and right there at checkout. Counterpoint expects EMI and financing to account for 42% of smartphone sales in India this year.
Global platforms selling into India tend to think of instalments as something for high-ticket items, used by customers who can’t pay upfront. Indian shoppers see it differently. For many, paying in parts is simply how you buy, and a checkout without that option feels incomplete. When they don’t find it, many go elsewhere.
BNPL in Global markets
Buy now, pay later grew quickly in the West. Worldpay’s 2026 Global Payments Report estimates global BNPL at around $300 billion, about 130 times its 2014 size. In 2025, it accounted for 6% of e-commerce value in the US. Klarna passed one million merchants this year, and the number of merchants offering its longer-term financing more than doubled in twelve months.
Western merchants treat BNPL as a way to win customers and are willing to pay for it. India has arrived somewhere similar, but by a different route and with a different kind of customer.
What’s different in India
The first difference is who uses it. Three in four credit-eligible adults in India have now borrowed formally at some point, and for many, the first loan was taken at checkout. But the Amazon data shows that people who could easily pay upfront choose EMI too. First-time borrowers and well-off buyers use it in similar ways.
Ticket sizes are also smaller than most people expect. Close to three-quarters of consumer durable loans in India are under ₹25,000, so this is mostly everyday spending on phones, appliances and the like.
It is also moving onto UPI. NPCI has put out a framework that brings credit, including EMIs, into regular UPI payments, and UPI apps have until 15 December 2026 to standardise how they support it. Most Indians already pay for almost everything on UPI, so this will put instalments in front of far more people.
India’s affordability picture, by the numbers
- 74% of 890 million credit-eligible adults had borrowed formally by March 2026, up from 35% in 2017 (TransUnion CIBIL)
- 46% of first-time borrowers started with a consumer durable loan in Q1 FY27 (TransUnion CIBIL)
- 73% of consumer durable loans in January to March 2026 were under ₹25,000, and 28.5% were under ₹10,000 (CRIF High Mark)
- About ₹20,000 was the average ticket that quarter, while loans above ₹50,000 grew to 29% of value (CRIF High Mark)
- 23 billion+ UPI transactions were processed in May 2026 alone (NPCI)
Where you’ll see it
Amazon’s Great Indian Festival is built largely around bank discounts, EMI tenures, no-cost EMI and pay later. The major Indian travel booking sites all offer EMI at checkout.
In July 2026, Emirates added EMI for Indian customers on emirates.com, with tenures from 3 to 36 months across 12 Indian banks. EMI started with electronics, but now appears in most categories where people spend a meaningful amount at once.
Why global checkouts don’t show it
Say a customer in Pune wants a ₹40,000 annual plan from a global platform. At checkout, they look for an EMI option and find only a field for an international card. A local competitor lets her pay ₹3,334 a month at no extra cost, so they go there instead. The global platform just records an abandoned checkout.
This isn’t a legal barrier. Indian customers can pay foreign platforms using Indian payment methods through RBI-authorised cross-border payment aggregators.
The issue is how these options are set up. Each one needs a business that an Indian bank or lender can recognise, sign an agreement with and pay inside India:
- Checkout EMI depends on a direct arrangement between the card issuer and the business.
- No-cost EMI needs the business’s subsidy to show up on the Indian cardholder’s statement.
- Bank offers require an agreement with the bank, and the systems that run them don’t work when checkout is priced in a foreign currency.
When a business is acquired outside India, none of that is in place, so the options don’t appear. Once collection happens inside India, they do.
The Cost
Stripe has tested this. When businesses offered at least one relevant payment method in addition to cards, conversion rose 7.4% on average, and revenue rose 12%.
To put rough numbers on it, using Stripe’s averages as an illustration: a platform with ₹10 crore a year in Indian sales and no relevant local payment method could be missing around ₹1.2 crore in revenue. That doesn’t include customers who specifically wanted instalments, which on Amazon’s smartphone checkout was one in five.
How Cashfree handles it
Cashfree’s cross-border stack lets a business outside India collect payments from Indian customers without setting up an Indian entity. It’s licensed under the RBI’s cross-border payment aggregator framework, and funds settle to you in your own currency.
Because collection happens inside India, Indian customers see the affordability options they’re used to: card EMI, no-cost EMI, cardless EMI, UPI EMI with Snapmint, and an interest-free split into three payments. They also get UPI, RuPay, cards and netbanking, which is how most of them prefer to pay anyway.
For the customer in Pune, that would have meant a ₹3,334-a-month option at checkout, and a sale that stayed with the platform they chose first.
If you’d like to see how no-cost EMI and UPI look on a cross-border checkout, book a walkthrough with Cashfree’s cross-border team.
