They make money from people’s mistakes and/or desperate situations.

As in: if a customer doesn’t pay one of the payments exactly on time they turn into loan sharks with “penalties” vastly exceeding the loan price.

They’re not “hoping the customers pay it back”, it’s almost the opposite - they want people to miss a payment or two and end up paying way more than the actual loan.

This is how they make money. It’s the only way they make money. The Maths of their business model don’t work out if people don’t make mistakes and thus don’t end up paying penalties.

So they have a huge incentive to do everything they can to make it easy to get into their scheme (hence they treat sellers well so that going through them as a payment option is as seamless as possible), to make it more likely that customers make mistakes and to make it hard or even impossible for customers to leave that scheme without going through the full minefield: they’re basically enshittifying the seller’s website, making it similar to providers with subscriptions who make it hard for people to cancel those subscriptions.

It’s really not worth it to get into that shit as a customer and, if people who get stung by those practices also blame the seller, it’s probably not also not worth it for a seller selling low value items as it might add but a handful of sales from the few customers that do need a loan for that, whilst damaging their own brand name by being associated with what are basically modern loan sharks.