I tried to get a big-ticket item using Klarna. Had the money in the bank, just thought I'd give it a go. It failed multiple times without any sort of meaningful error message. Apparently each of those failed attempts hit my credit score. I told them to close my account multiple times through multiple channels (chat/email/etc.) and reverse any damage done to my credit score.
Till this day I get monthly balance/statement emails from them even though I have yet to use a single penny of their credit facility. Too bad they don't use all that marketing budget on competent customer experience/service.
Yup funny how big they growth becouse they pretty much dont add anything to consumer experience and they are well know issues like if you know social security number you can order stuff.
Oh all the things I wish they would use their marketing budget on. For instance they still can't correctly compute different VAT classes in their merchant reports.
After the third attempt I decided to chat with Klarna support. They saw the attempts and told me to stop trying as it would be damaging my credit score. What exactly is the truth? I don't know. Klarna is a black box to me.
My guess is you were accidentally using 'Klarna Financing' - that's not their main product and not what most people think of when you say 'Klarna' - it's a formal consumer-credit loan. It's like getting a car loan, rather than paying in instalments, as their main product is.
And yeah that'd be apocalyptic on your credit score - equivalent of being rejected for a car loan multiple times in a day!
It's not a big deal on credit scores at all actually. FICO-8 and the other common credit score algorithms all make the assumption that multiple credit checks in a short period of time just means the person is rate shopping, which is an extremely common thing. When I got a car last year I had ten hard lookups in a single day- this didn't do any more "damage" than a single lookup.
On top of that even hard lookups stop affecting scores pretty quickly. They really exist to prevent someone from taking out a bunch of loans without each other loan company knowing about it.
I do know that things like the Vantage score, used by credit karma and nerd wallet, put a higher weight on these checks. This is, in my opinion, purely to drive engagement to their website. FICO is what is actually used by lenders, and tends to be more stable (in my experience).
It was the 0% Klarna option (the only Klarna option) on the Google Store if that makes it any clearer. I stay away from this stuff generally so I can't tell the difference between these options when I'm trying to checkout.
Till this day I get monthly balance/statement emails from them even though I have yet to use a single penny of their credit facility. Too bad they don't use all that marketing budget on competent customer experience/service.