Affirm Wins Exclusive Sam's Club BNPL Deal After Walmart Exit

What happened

Affirm has been named the exclusive buy now, pay later provider for Sam's Club, the warehouse chain owned by Walmart. The deal runs for several years and was announced on Thursday, October 22.26 Shoppers on SamsClub.com will start seeing Affirm at checkout in the coming weeks, and the company plans to bring the option into Sam's Club stores in 2027.38 Neither side disclosed the financial terms.23

The product is simple. When a shopper checks out, Affirm runs a real-time eligibility check on that particular purchase. If the shopper is approved, they choose a monthly plan and can see every payment amount and the final payoff date before agreeing to anything.34 Affirm repeated its usual pitch: it charges no late fees, and its interest never compounds.15 Several outlets add that the plans apply to eligible purchases of $500 or more and that some purchases may require a down payment.310

Wayne Pommen, Affirm's chief revenue officer, said in the announcement that people who pay over time with Affirm know what they will owe and can choose a plan that fits their lives.410

The Walmart backstory makes this deal matter more

This partnership looks very different once you remember what happened 19 months ago. In March 2025, Klarna announced that it would replace Affirm as Walmart's exclusive provider of installment loans, offered through OnePay, the fintech app that Walmart majority-owns.1214 Affirm had been Walmart's BNPL partner since 2019.1214 Its shares fell more than 11% in premarket trading on the day of the announcement.14

At the time, William Blair analysts said the loss of such an important retail partner could not be spun positively. They also argued that the contract was probably one Affirm would not have wanted, because it would have meant giving OnePay control of the customer experience.12 Affirm later told shareholders it expected to substantially wind down its Walmart business by its fiscal second quarter of 2026.17 Klarna's loans then launched at Walmart in September 2025.17 In January 2026, Klarna and OnePay added "Swipe to Finance," which lets customers turn debit card purchases into installment plans after the fact.1620

Sam's Club belongs to the same parent company that dropped Affirm. Bloomberg's coverage stresses this point by calling the warehouse chain "Walmart Inc.'s Sam's Club" in its first sentence.2 Quartz also notes the Walmart ownership.3 None of the reports explain why Walmart's warehouse business went one way while its main stores went the other. My reading is that this is not a quiet reversal of the Klarna decision. It looks more like a sign that Walmart is willing to choose different partners for different channels, and that Affirm's terms suited a membership-club checkout where it controls the experience directly. This is an inference, and none of the coverage confirms it.

The Walmart loss may also have hurt less than the headlines suggested. In May 2026, at Affirm's Investor Day, CEO Max Levchin reportedly said that most of the Walmart customers it lost got Affirm Cards and kept shopping at Walmart. Affirm's Walmart volume is said to have kept growing even with Klarna holding the exclusive slot.13 If that's right, losing a checkout button does not mean losing the customer. That makes Affirm's push to win checkout placements look like one part of a wider strategy, not a desperate attempt to make up lost ground.

How the coverage lines up, and where it doesn't

The main facts are consistent everywhere: the deal is exclusive and lasts several years, online launch comes first, stores follow in 2027, and terms were not disclosed.1259 Some details differ.

The first is the purchase threshold. Quartz, StreetInsider and Investing.com all report a $500 minimum.1310 Affirm's own release talks more broadly about shoppers spending "a few hundred dollars" on holiday preparations or buying a thousand-dollar TV.8 Those two descriptions don't fully match. The reported floor suggests Sam's Club is aiming the product at big-ticket items, at least at first, not at everyday stock-up runs.

The second is how the stock moved. One headline said Affirm shares "edge up" after the announcement.7 A Yahoo Finance quote shown alongside the press release had the stock down 2.11%.6 Neither figure says much about a single day of trading. The safer conclusion is that investors did not treat the deal as a major event either way. That is a sharp contrast with the double-digit drop when Walmart left.

The third is framing. Newswire-style reports mostly repeat the release.510 Bloomberg focuses on timing, noting that the deal lands just weeks before the holiday shopping season.2 PYMNTS presents it as part of a fight for shoppers who increasingly use more than one BNPL app.4 I think PYMNTS has the most useful angle, and its data shows why.

The competitive picture

BNPL users are not loyal to one provider. PYMNTS reports that 74% of users had used two or more providers in the three months through May, up from 68% in April 2025.4 When shoppers switch this easily, an exclusive spot at a major retailer's checkout is one of the few lasting advantages a lender can hold.

The market is close. Affirm reaches 50% of U.S. BNPL users, just ahead of Afterpay at 48%, Klarna at 47% and PayPal Pay Later at 41%.4 With gaps that small, each exclusive deal counts. Klarna has Walmart's main channel and Affirm now has the warehouse arm. Klarna's executives have themselves argued that winning repeat users matters more than getting onto any single retailer's list of payment options.17

The two companies run different business models. One merchant-focused comparison estimates Affirm's take rate at about 8.9% of gross merchandise volume, against roughly 2.7% for Klarna. It also puts Affirm's average order value at around $255, about 2.5 times Klarna's figure of roughly $101.13 A $500 floor at a warehouse club fits Affirm's focus on larger purchases. Sam's Club members buying televisions, appliances or furniture are the kind of borrowers Affirm's model is built for.

For shoppers, the comparison with what Walmart now offers is notable. OnePay Later, the Klarna-powered product at Walmart, is described as covering purchases from $50 to $6,000 at 10% to 36% APR, with a $5 late fee.11 Affirm's promise of no late fees, which it repeats in every announcement, is a real difference. Comparison sites point to it as something Klarna does not match.13

Affirm's growth and where it's heading

The Sam's Club deal comes as Affirm's business is changing. In its fiscal fourth quarter, transactions rose 41% year over year to 53 million, faster than the 36% growth in gross merchandise volume to $14.1 billion. Average order value fell 4%.4 Active users of the Affirm Card more than doubled to 5.2 million.4 Together, those numbers show Affirm moving from occasional big-purchase loans toward more frequent spending through its card. The Sam's Club placement serves both: it brings in big-ticket checkout volume now and, possibly, new card users later.

The deal is also one of a string of partnerships. It follows a UK BNPL tie-up with Amazon announced in September,4 a Crate & Barrel partnership in late September, and an October agreement with Ant International's Antom.8 Affirm reports fiscal first-quarter 2027 results on November 5.8 Investors will probably press management there on how much volume Sam's Club could bring and how fast the move into stores will happen.

The takeaway

It is tempting to read this as Affirm getting revenge on Walmart. I think the bigger story is that BNPL exclusivity is now being negotiated channel by channel and brand by brand, even inside one corporate group. Walmart has shown it will change BNPL partners when the terms suit it. Finovate pointed out after the Klarna switch that no provider in this market is untouchable.15 That lesson cuts both ways. Affirm is back at a Walmart-owned checkout, but its new position depends on the same kind of contract it lost before. The deal's real test will come in 2027, when Affirm moves into Sam's Club stores, and in whether club shoppers who first use Affirm online keep using it afterward.