Accepting Riverty as a merchant

Riverty offers deferred payment, pay after delivery and instalments, and is widely used in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the Nordics. Dutch merchants will know the proposition from its earlier incarnation as AfterPay. The mechanics matter less than the economics, because what you are buying is not payment processing.

Economics

What the fee is actually for

With pay after delivery, Riverty assumes the receivable and pays you while your customer settles later. You are buying credit risk transfer, working capital and a collections function. That is why the fee sits well above card acceptance, and why comparing it to a card rate is the wrong comparison. The right one is against your bad debt rate, your days sales outstanding and the cost of the collections process you would otherwise run.

Pay after delivery is a returns instrument as much as a payment one

In the Netherlands and Germany, paying after delivery is a deeply embedded consumer expectation, particularly in fashion. It also interacts directly with returns behaviour: a customer who has not yet paid behaves differently from one who has. That is a genuine trade-off, not a reason to avoid the method, but it belongs in the calculation alongside conversion rather than being treated as a separate operational issue.

The substitution question

The same trap applies here as with any deferred payment method. Some of the customers choosing it would have paid immediately by iDEAL or card, and every euro of that volume is revenue you already had, now carrying a higher fee. The method earns its cost on customers who would otherwise have abandoned. Measuring that split is the whole business case and almost nobody does it.

Which payment provider supports Riverty?

MultiSafepay, Nexi, Computop and Buckaroo all document Riverty, along with several other gateways in the Benelux and DACH region. The useful questions are the fee as a percentage of order value, the acceptance rate on your customer profile, when you are paid, how returns and disputes are handled, and what proportion of orders moved off a cheaper method after it was enabled.

Assessment

What mandatory affordability checking does to a high-frequency, low-value product

Directive (EU) 2023/2225, the second Consumer Credit Directive, repeals the 2008 directive with effect from 20 November 2026, and member states were required to transpose it by 20 November 2025. The headline changes are the same for every deferred payment method in your checkout. What differs is how hard each one is hit, and pay after delivery sits at the exposed end.

The reason is the shape of the product. Instalment credit on a 900-euro sofa is assessed once, on a customer who expects to be assessed and who is making a considered purchase. Pay after delivery is assessed on almost every order, at 60 or 80 euros, by a customer who experiences it as a checkbox rather than as a credit application. Apply a mandatory affordability assessment to that shape and the number of decisions scales with your order count, which means the number of declines does too.

So the exposure lands in your checkout rather than in your provider’s licence file. Two things follow from that. A cheaper immediate method has to be present and visible enough to catch a customer who is declined at the last step, because that decline is silent to you and terminal to the order. And your own product pages carry pay-later messaging that the stricter advertising rules reach, which makes it your copy and your exposure rather than your provider’s. Ask for a modelled acceptance rate after the change on your own customer profile, and ask what a declined customer is actually shown.

Substitution

The substitution split, in euros

The section above says measuring the split is the whole business case. Here is what the two halves look like with numbers on them, because the argument only becomes actionable at that point.

Take 10 million euros of revenue across the Netherlands and Germany with 25 per cent running through Riverty, so 2.5 million euros. Suppose the all-in Riverty fee is 2.6 per cent against 0.6 per cent for iDEAL or a card. That is 65,000 euros where the same volume on the cheaper rail would have cost 15,000, so the method carries 50,000 euros of extra fee a year.

Now split it. If 70 per cent of that volume is substitution, meaning customers who would have bought anyway, then 1.75 million euros of it is paying 35,000 euros extra for revenue you already had. The other 750,000 euros is incremental and cost 15,000 euros of extra fee to win. At a 40 per cent gross margin, that incremental revenue is 300,000 euros of gross profit, so the method returns twenty times its incremental cost on the half nobody disputes and wastes 35,000 euros on the half nobody measures. You cannot remove substitution, but you can shape it: a minimum order value for presenting the method, its position in the list, and whether it is preselected. Those three settings move the substitution share without touching the incremental share, and none of them requires a conversation with your provider.

Acceptance

Acceptance rate is the number nobody quotes

A fee is quoted before you sign and an acceptance rate is discovered afterwards, which is the wrong way round given which of the two moves more money. Acceptance on a credit product varies by customer profile, order value, market and time of month, and it varies far more than card authorisation does.

Put it beside the fee. On 2.5 million euros of attempted Riverty volume, five points of acceptance is 125,000 euros of orders that either find another method in your checkout or leave. A fee negotiation that wins twenty basis points on the same volume is worth 5,000. The two numbers are not in the same weight class, and only one of them is usually on the agenda. Ask for your acceptance rate by segment and by order value band, monthly, and ask what a declined customer is shown.

Reviewing what this costs you

What you pay is set in your PSP contract, not by the scheme. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or put your own volume through the PSP Upside Calculator, because this is the method where the distance between a negotiated rate and a standard one is widest.

The extra steps a pay-later method adds are where orders are lost, and that is a matter of checkout optimisation rather than of rate.

Relevant markets: Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Nordics