U.S. consumers are so financially strained they put more than $1 billion on buy-now, pay later services during Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Financially strained and cautious customers leaned heavily on buy now, pay later (BNPL) services over the holiday weekend.

Cyber Monday alone generated $1.03 billion (a 4.2% increase YoY) in online BNPL sales with most transactions happening on mobile devices, per Adobe Analytics. Overall, consumers spent $14.25 billion online on Cyber Monday. To put that into perspective, BNPL made up for more than 7.2% of total online sales on that day.

As for Black Friday, eMarketer reported $747.5 million in online sales using BNPL services with platforms like PayPal finding a 23% uptick in BNPL transactions.

Likewise, digital financial services company Zip reported 1.6 million transactions throughout 280,000 of its locations over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend. Millennials (51%) accounte