Recital 17

(17) Certain deferred payments, where a supplier of goods or a provider of services gives the consumer time to pay for a good or service free of interest and without any other charges except for limited charges for late payments in accordance with national law, should be excluded from the scope of this Directive, provided that there is no third party, such as in ‘buy now, pay later’ schemes, offering credit for the good or service and that the payment is to be entirely executed in a limited time-frame of 50 days from the delivery of the good or provision of the service. In fact, such deferred payments are business practices commonly used to allow consumers to pay only after receipt of the goods or services, which are beneficial for consumers, for instance in the case of deferred payment of medical bills where hospitals give time to consumers to pay for medical expenses. That exclusion should be restricted for certain large online suppliers of goods or providers of services which have access to a large customer base, where a third party is neither offering nor purchasing credit and where payment is to be entirely executed within 14 days of the delivery of the goods or services, free of interest and without any other charges and with only limited charges payable by the consumer for late payments imposed in accordance with national law. Such large online suppliers, considering their financial capacities and their ability to drive consumers towards impulsive buying and potentially over-consumption, would otherwise be able to offer deferred payment in a very extensive way without any safeguard for consumers and to weaken fair competition with other suppliers of goods or providers of services. Such a restriction would always allow consumers to make payments in a convenient way within two weeks, while ensuring that, if large online suppliers of goods or providers of services want to provide credit on a large scale with a longer timeframe, they are subject to this Directive.

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Source: EUR-Lex CELLAR · retrieved 2026-07-30 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.