KlarnaBot FAQ

Klarna uses automated processes (“bots”) to collect, update and verify information related to e-commerce. This data collection enables Klarna to provide consumers with accurate and up-to-date information about products, offers, and online merchants, leading to increased traffic to our partners.

Web site owners - most commonly e-commerce merchants - may see traffic from Klarna. This is, in the vast majority of cases, benign and beneficial. In some cases, website owners will want to control how KlarnaBot access their systems - most commonly by explicitly allowing access (“whitelisting”) to product pages through their robots.txt file and blocking parts of their sites to reduce the load.

Klarna uses short custom user-agent strings to identify its bots. These start with the string KlarnaBot and are descriptive.

Example: KlarnaBot-PriceWatcher/1.0

Note: The use of the user-agent KlarnaBot does not guarantee that the traffic comes from Klarna.

The Klarna app uses mobile user-agent strings with Klarna/x.y.z appended, example (iOS):

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148 Klarna/21.19.146

This user agent string identifies traffic coming from the Klarna app users

Enabled when a Klarna app user (a) bookmarks a page that contains price information and (b) enables price or stock status notifications for said page. The price watcher bot will revisit the bookmarked page every so often to check for updates. When a price changes such as a discount or a product comes in stock, the user will receive an app notification. This has an increased chance of conversion for the merchant. This bot drives return traffic, with a good chance of conversion for the merchant, at an average order value roughly 25% above the Klarna norm.

We disable this feature on merchant websites where we are unable to extract accurate product information. We use the same logic for the save feature within the Klarna app. If you identify quality issues with the data displayed for items saved from your store in the Klarna app, we recommend you to use web standards such as Opengraph, JSON-LD, or schema.org.

Klarna uses several techniques to keep the load from this bot light, including classifying bookmarked pages by type, only checking a specific URL once for all users “subscribing” to it, permanently blocking pages that return error codes, etc.

It is used to enrich user purchase data with links and images to the purchased product. The most common case when this is needed is when a merchant has an incomplete integration with Klarna - often due to restrictions in an e-commerce framework or platform. The bot connects to the merchant website, navigates as needed until it finds the purchased product, and then saves a reference to the product page and image. We add them to the user’s purchase history view, where having product images increase return traffic to the merchant’s product page by almost 600%.

Traffic from this bot is light, as it is used exactly once for a particular product the first time any Klarna user purchases it. Higher traffic is possible during a batch update, such as when performing backfill on past purchases. We throttle this traffic to reduce website load.

This bot is not used for Klarna partners who provide complete information when placing orders, or with product feeds of sufficient quality for Klarna to match purchases to entries in the product feeds.

It is used to download images of products purchased by Klarna users. These product images are used in the user purchase history and similar places in the Klarna app, always linking back to the merchant’s product page. Product images increase return traffic to the merchant’s product page by almost 600%.

We download product images regardless of whether the merchant has a complete integration of order placement or if we use a post-purchase enrichment (above) to be cached for Klarna app users, thus reducing the load on merchant websites. We use the bot once per product, normally for the purchase by a Klarna user. Higher traffic is possible during a batch update, such as when performing backfill on past purchases. We throttle this traffic to reduce website load.

We use the data fetched by the different Klarna bots to drive traffic back to your websites. The features enabled by them are correlated with an increase in average order value and return visits.

The easiest way to allow the Klarna bots to operate is to explicitly allow traffic from any client whose user-agent starts with KlarnaBot.

If you see the need to do this, always reach out to your Partner Success Team so that we can understand why we are causing issues for you and help resolve them. We can disable or restrict functionality on the Klarna side very quickly, and our operations are available 24/7.