BNPL Firm Afterpay Debuts Ads

Afterpay Ads

Australian buy now, pay later (BNPL) company Afterpay on Tuesday (Aug. 24) announced the launch of Afterpay Ads. The new advertising solution allows brands to place featured ads across the Afterpay app to enhance retailer promotions, products and offers on a pay-per-click basis.

The advertising addition is aimed at helping retailers reach Gen Z and millennial buyers, according to the company. The Afterpay platform sees an average of one million referrals daily from the Afterpay Shop Directory. Of those, roughly 55 percent come from the Afterpay app, the company said in the press release.

“Our merchant partners already rely on Afterpay as one of their most valuable channels to acquire and reach the next generation of shoppers — millennial and Gen Z shoppers, who represent the vast majority of the spending power in the market today,” said Mark Teperson, Afterpay’s chief strategy officer. “Afterpay Ads unleash the power of our ecosystem by giving brands a new way to promote products, collections and offers to Afterpay’s highly engaged young audience of shoppers.”

Afterpay is available in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.S. and the UK, France, Italy and Spain, where it is known as Clearpay.thTo get started with Afterpay Ads, companies choose the products they want to highlight through sponsored listing formats, including deals, products and collections, and then pay a fee when a shopper interacts with the ad.

Tuesday’s announcement comes on the heels of the recent addition of Afterpay’s merchant analytics platform, Afterpay iQ, as PYMNTS reported. The artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform provides an analysis of various operations, including omnichannel shopping quantities, specialized demographics on a store-by-store basis and real-time data that is available through the self-service user interface.

Read more: BNPL Firm Afterpay Launches Data Platform For Merchants

Earlier this month, FinTech payment giant Square announced that it would purchase Afterpay in a $29 billion all-stock deal, PYMNTS reported.

See also: BNPL Takes Its Next Dramatic Turn As Square Buys Afterpay For $29B

The race to join the BNPL field is heating up, with PayPal announcing that it will stop charging late fees for consumers using its BNPL service beginning in October

Related news: PayPal To Drop BNPL Late Fees