Run both, put Afterpay first in the payment list, and set your minimums in the provider's merchant portal rather than hoping Shopify will do it for you. That's the short answer to Afterpay and Zip on Shopify checkout in Australia, and if you only read one paragraph, read that one. The longer answer is that BNPL is a margin and merchandising decision dressed up as a payments decision, and with BFCM about four weeks out and Click Frenzy landing before it, the settings you choose now are the ones your peak traffic will hit. Changing a minimum order value on 28 November is not a plan.
Should you offer Afterpay or Zip, or both?
Both, in most cases. They don't cannibalise each other the way people assume, because they serve different baskets. Afterpay splits a purchase into four fortnightly payments with no interest and a hard ceiling on order value. Zip runs two products: a smaller revolving account for low-ticket repeat buying, and a larger-limit option aimed at the kind of purchase a customer thinks about for a week before committing. If your AOV sits under about $120, Afterpay alone will cover most of the demand. If you sell anything in the $400–$2,500 range — furniture, appliances, bikes, higher-end jewellery, prams — the Zip option earns its fee on the orders that would otherwise sit in the cart until February.
The case for dropping one is real though. Every additional method on the payment step is another radio button a shopper has to read, and fringe methods with a 1% share add cognitive load for no return. Pull your last twelve months of orders, filter by payment method, and if a gateway is under 2% of order volume and isn't growing, turn it off before peak. We'd rather see three well-ordered options than seven.
Afterpay fees for Australian Shopify stores, and the number that actually matters
BNPL merchant fees in Australia are a percentage plus a fixed per-transaction amount, negotiated on volume, and the percentage is several times what you pay on a card. Don't take a number off a blog — including this one. Open your last monthly statement, divide total fees by total processed value, and you have your real effective rate. That's the figure to plan against, because the headline rate in your agreement almost never matches it once fixed fees land on small baskets.
Two things merchants routinely miss. First, the fixed component is brutal on low-value orders: a 30c fee on a $25 order is 1.2% on its own. Second, those fees carry GST, and you can claim the input tax credit. If a transaction fee shows as $6.30 on your tax invoice, the GST component is $6.30 ÷ 11 = $0.57, so the cost that actually hits your P&L is $5.73. On a $120 order that's 4.77%, not 5.25%. Worth a conversation with your accountant before you panic about the gross rate.
The break-even arithmetic, done properly
Here's the calculation we run with clients before peak. Say you expect 1,000 orders over the BFCM weekend, AOV $120, blended gross margin 55%.
On cards alone at roughly 1.75% + 30c, you pay about $2.40 an order, so $2,400 in fees.
Now assume Afterpay takes 35% of those orders at 5% + 30c. That's $6.30 on each of 350 orders, or $2,205. The remaining 650 card orders cost $1,560. Total: $3,765. BNPL has cost you $1,365 more than a card-only weekend.
Gross profit per order is 0.55 × $120 = $66. So you need $1,365 ÷ $66 = 20.7 incremental orders to break even. Twenty-one orders out of a thousand. Just over 2% lift.
That threshold is low enough that BNPL almost always clears it, which is why the argument is usually over before it starts. But run your own version with your own margin, because at 25% gross margin the same calculation needs 45 incremental orders instead of 21, and at that point the discount you were planning on top of BNPL is the thing to cut.
The second half of the number is basket size. Filter your orders by payment method in the Shopify admin and compare AOV across gateways for the same date range. If BNPL baskets run materially larger than card baskets on your store, the fee is buying you revenue, not just conversion. If they don't, you have a merchandising problem that BNPL won't fix.
BNPL minimum order value on Shopify: set it where it does work
You set minimum and maximum order values in the provider's merchant portal, not in Shopify settings. Shopify then hides the method when the cart falls outside the range. This is the setting most often left on its default and it quietly costs money in both directions.
Too low, and you're paying a fixed fee on $18 orders where the shopper would happily have tapped Apple Pay. Too high, and you've built a cliff the customer never sees coming — they add a $40 item, get to checkout, and the option they chose your store for has disappeared with no explanation.
The part that needs thought: your BNPL minimum and your free shipping threshold should not be two separate cliffs. If free shipping kicks in at $75 and your BNPL minimum is $50, you've created a dead zone between $50 and $75 where the customer qualifies for one incentive and not the other. Pick one threshold and align the other to it, or sit the BNPL minimum well below so it's never the binding constraint. Given what Australia Post and Sendle actually charge to get a 2kg parcel to regional WA, the shipping threshold is the one that should drive the number. Let it.
Check the maximum too. Bundle pricing at BFCM pushes carts higher than usual, and if your gift set lands above the provider's cap, the method vanishes silently on exactly the orders you most wanted. Build a test cart above your largest expected order and look.
Surcharging: read your merchant agreement before you get clever
The instinct to pass a 5% fee to the customer is understandable and, under most BNPL merchant agreements in Australia, prohibited. The provider's whole proposition to the shopper is that it costs them nothing, and the contracts protect that. Surcharging rules in Australian payments are under active review and the position may shift, so the honest advice is to check your current agreement rather than act on what someone told you last year. If you want to recover the cost, do it in your pricing or your shipping threshold, not at the payment step.
Wallet order at Shopify checkout in Australia: what you actually control
Two different lists, two different behaviours, and merchants conflate them constantly.
The accelerated checkout buttons — Shop Pay, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay — sit above the form, and their display is partly dynamic: Apple Pay only shows on Apple devices, and a returning Shop Pay customer sees a different experience to a first-timer. You control whether they appear and broadly where, not the exact stacking on every device. Keep this block to three. A wall of six buttons above the email field is a wall, and on mobile it pushes the actual form below the fold.
The alternative payment methods, including Afterpay and Zip, appear in the payment step as a list, and you can drag them into the order you want in Settings → Payments. Put the one with your highest order share at the top. For most Australian apparel, beauty and homewares stores that's Afterpay; for higher-ticket categories it may not be. Sort by your own data, not by habit.
One more thing to test on a real phone before peak: how the list renders at 375px wide. We've seen stores where the fifth payment method sits below the fold on an iPhone SE and may as well not exist.
Afterpay on-site messaging on product pages, without wrecking your LCP
The "4 payments of $X" line under the price does measurable work, mostly because it reframes a $160 purchase as a $40 one. Put it directly under the price on the product page, on the cart drawer, and nowhere else. Three placements is plenty.
Use the copy the provider supplies and don't rewrite it. BNPL in Australia now sits inside the credit regulation framework, and the wording providers hand you is shaped by that; inventing your own line about interest-free easy payments is how you end up with a compliance email. The same instinct applies to any sustainability or provenance claim you're running alongside the sale — the ACCC has been visibly active on vague environmental marketing, and BFCM copy written in a hurry is where the sloppy claims go in.
The technical cost is real. Each provider's messaging widget is an external script, and running two of them plus a reviews app plus a popup tool on the product template is how a 1.9s LCP becomes 3.4s. If the price block shifts when the instalment line loads, that's CLS too. Either render the instalment amount server-side from the price in your theme, or load the widget after the main content paints. If you want the score measured and watched over the peak rather than checked once in October, SwiftStore handles the scanning and monitoring; the fixes that matter most are usually theme-level anyway, and our speed work starts there.
Zip vs Afterpay: where conversion actually differs
Afterpay has the stronger brand recall with younger shoppers and the larger installed base, so on a typical fashion or beauty store it will take the bigger share of BNPL orders and the two sit close on AOV. Zip's advantage shows up at the top of the price range, where the four-fortnightly structure stops being useful because $400 split four ways is still $100 a fortnight.
The measurement most merchants get wrong: comparing conversion rate between the two gateways tells you very little, because the customer has already decided to buy by the time they pick. What's worth tracking is BNPL's share of orders by price band. Segment your orders into $0–75, $75–200, $200–500 and $500+, and look at which method dominates each. That tells you where to put the on-site messaging and whether the second provider is paying for itself. If Zip is under 3% of orders at every price band, it's a line item, not a strategy.
Shop Pay Installments in Australia
It isn't an option for Australian merchants. Shopify's instalment product is tied to a specific lender and specific markets, and Australia hasn't been one of them — verify in your own admin, because availability changes, but don't build your BFCM plan around it. Shop Pay itself, the accelerated wallet, is a different thing entirely and is worth having enabled: it's a one-tap checkout for returning customers and it carries no BNPL fee. Enable the wallet, assume the instalments product isn't coming before December.
BNPL refunds and chargebacks on Shopify
Refunds go back through the original method from the Shopify order, which is straightforward. What isn't straightforward is the per-transaction fee, which you should assume you don't get back — check your agreement, but plan for the fee being sunk. On a category with a 30% return rate, that's a cost worth modelling before you run a deep BFCM discount on returnable stock.
Partial refunds are where the support tickets come from. When you refund part of a BNPL order, the provider rebuilds the customer's remaining instalment schedule, and the customer frequently doesn't understand what happened. They see a payment still coming out and email you about it. Have a saved reply ready, and process January refunds the day the parcel lands rather than batching them weekly — the customer is still being debited while you sit on it.
Chargebacks work differently to cards. The provider owns the relationship with the shopper and handles the dispute, then recovers from you if it goes against the merchant. You'll respond in their portal, not in Shopify's dispute flow, and the clock is usually short. Make sure whoever is on duty over the Christmas break has the login. This is the single most common gap we find in a pre-peak checkout review — the payment methods are configured beautifully and nobody can access the merchant portal.
What to lock in the next four weeks
Order of operations, in the sequence we'd work it:
- Pull twelve months of orders by payment method and price band. Kill anything under 2% that isn't growing.
- Set the alternative payment method order in Settings → Payments to match that data.
- Align the BNPL minimum with your free shipping threshold, and test a cart above your largest expected order value against the maximum.
- Place instalment messaging on the product page and cart only, using the provider's supplied copy, and check LCP on a throttled mobile connection before and after.
- Test a full purchase, a partial refund and a full refund on each method in a live order. Not a test gateway. A real one for a dollar.
- Confirm merchant portal access for whoever is covering the break, and check your Australia Post cut-off dates — they fall earlier for WA and regional, and your BNPL customers will be paying instalments on parcels that haven't arrived.
Do steps one to three this week and the rest before Click Frenzy. If you want a second pair of eyes on the checkout before the traffic arrives, that's the kind of thing our Australian team turns around in a few days rather than a few weeks.