Tabby and Tamara for online stores: what buy now, pay later does

Nobody outside your business can tell you whether Tabby or Tamara will lift your sales. The public numbers are group-wide, the fee sits in your merchant agreement, and the effect depends on your prices. What you can do is work out the break-even in five minutes and test it over a few weeks.

What do the public numbers actually tell you?

Buy now, pay later is a payment option that lets the shopper split the price into instalments, with a provider such as Tabby or Tamara running the repayments. Tabby, at least, is large and well funded. Wamda reported on 14 September 2026 that Tabby raised USD 233 million at a USD 6.5 billion valuation, with 25 million registered users and 70,000 business partners across its markets.

Read that as group-wide, not UAE. Tabby is headquartered in Saudi Arabia, and no UAE-only user count for Tabby or Tamara turned up in the sources we could verify. The figures show that the providers are big. They don't show that your shoppers use them, or that your sales would rise.

One UAE change is worth knowing about. Gulf News reported on 27 July 2026 that the Etihad Credit Bureau, the federal credit agency, will reflect Tabby and Tamara transactions in UAE credit reports from July 2026. How that affects scores or checkout behaviour isn't established in anything we could verify, so keep your instalment messaging plain and make no promises about credit.

What does it cost, and how many extra orders pay for it?

The fee is in the provider's current terms, so get it in writing: the percentage, any fixed amount per order, and when you're paid. This post doesn't quote one, because the current terms are the only version that counts. Once you have the figure, the break-even is a single line.

Multiply the share of your orders that would use BNPL by the fee rate, and call the result F. The extra orders you need, as a share of today's orders, equal F divided by (your contribution margin minus F). Use margin after delivery, payment costs and returns, not the margin on the price tag.

Say your contribution margin is 36% of revenue, 22% of orders would use BNPL and the fee is 5% of those orders. In this made-up case F is 1.1% and the break-even is 1.1 divided by 34.9, about 3.2% more orders. That is roughly one extra order for every thirty already coming in.

With those inputs the hurdle is small. The harder part is measuring it: if your store takes a few dozen orders a week, a 3% change disappears inside normal week-to-week swings and no test will show it. In that case test on your most expensive products only, where instalments should matter most, or decide on the fee and the shopper experience alone.

How do you test it without fooling yourself?

Compare orders per hundred visitors with BNPL on and off. Don't compare the baskets of BNPL buyers with card buyers, because shoppers choose instalments for bigger purchases, so BNPL orders will look larger whether or not BNPL created them.

1. 01Write the question down: does BNPL raise contribution per hundred visitors after the fee? Everything else in the test serves that sentence.
2. 02Record a baseline for the four weeks before: orders per hundred sessions, average order value, the share of cash on delivery orders and, if you have it, the refusal rate on those.
3. 03Switch BNPL off and on in alternate weeks, four weeks of each, so month-end and month-start weeks land in both settings. If your platform can show the instalment badge to half the visitors and hide it from the rest, use that instead, because it removes the calendar from the comparison.
4. 04Change nothing else. No new discounts, campaigns or price changes while the test runs. If something unavoidable happens, note the date and leave those days out.
5. 05Compare orders per hundred sessions, average order value and contribution per hundred sessions after the fee. Keep BNPL only if contribution is higher with it on by more than the gap you saw between two ordinary weeks.
6. 06If the result is too noisy to read, don't extend the test indefinitely. Narrow it to the highest-priced products, or make the call on fee, payout timing and support.

This is routine conversion work, and if nobody on your team can run it, it's a sensible first job for an outside e-commerce marketing team. Proper A/B testing needs a lot of traffic, which is why the alternating-week version above exists.

What should you ask Tabby or Tamara before you sign?

Questions, not assumptions, because every answer sits in the provider's current terms.

• What is the fee exactly: a percentage, a fixed amount per order, or both, and does it change with order value or product category?
• When are you paid, and what happens to that payment when a shopper returns an item or pays late?
• Who carries the loss if a shopper doesn't pay, you or the provider?
• Which order values does it accept, and what does a declined shopper see at checkout?
• How does a refund of part of an order work, and who processes it?
• Does the integration add scripts to your product pages, and can you switch the badge off without a developer?
• What is the contract term, and how do you leave?

Where is it most likely to help first?

On your highest-priced products, and possibly on your cash on delivery problem. A shopper who completes an instalment checkout has been through the provider's approval and committed at the checkout, which a cash on delivery buyer hasn't. Confirm how the provider handles approval before you rely on that, then watch the refusal rate in the test, because failed cash on delivery orders cost you the parcel twice.

It is least likely to matter on low-priced items, where instalments barely change what the shopper pays each month.

Before you integrate anything, pull your last 90 days of orders and work out the contribution margin per order. With the break-even in hand you can negotiate the fee and judge the test. Without it, the provider's sales deck is the only set of numbers in the room.