Embedded insurance quietly passed $200 billion. Here's the merchant read.

For most of the last decade, "insurtech" meant a new insurance company — a startup with a better app, a chatbot claims flow, a friendlier brand. That story is still going, but it stopped being the interesting one a while ago. The bigger move is embedded: insurance sold through non-insurance brands, at the moment a customer is already buying something else. A pet food order that ships with a prescription savings card. A $600 espresso machine cart that adds a three-year protection plan for $34. A flight that quietly includes cancellation coverage.

None of that reads as "insurance" to the buyer. It reads as one more decision inside a checkout they already trust. And the volumes are past the point where you can call it early.

The category shifted while the label stayed the same

The most recent sizing I've seen puts the global embedded-insurance market at $210.9 billion in gross written premium in 2025, growing at a 35.14% CAGR to roughly $950.6 billion by 2030. Close to a 5x in five years. That growth is not being pushed by carriers building new digital channels — carriers have been trying to do that for two decades with modest results. It is being pulled by retailers, marketplaces, travel platforms, and OEMs deciding that the checkout they own is worth something to a carrier who does not.

The framing matters, because it changes who the buyer of the technology actually is. A decade ago, the customer for "embedded insurance" was a carrier's digital team. Today it is more often a head of ecommerce or a DTC founder who has never talked to an insurer before, and is trying to work out why their protection-plan attach rate is 3% when a competitor's is 14%.

What the consumer numbers actually say

The demand side finally caught up in a way that is easy to measure. Cover Genius's 2024 retail survey found that 60.1% of consumers would buy insurance or a warranty from an ecommerce retailer if it were offered at checkout, and 78% said they would spend more with a retailer that offered it. Both numbers are worth reading twice.

The first one collapses the standard objection to embedding, which is that customers won't want insurance from a brand they know for something else. They do. They prefer it, because the friction of buying a policy from an insurance company is worse than the friction of clicking a box in a cart they were already going to complete.

The second is the more commercially interesting number. A 78% lift in stated willingness to spend at retailers that offer coverage means the presence of the offer moves the primary transaction, not just the attach. That is the same pattern financing did to furniture and jewelry retail. The plan changes what the customer will consider buying at all.

Checkout is a distribution channel now

If you run a Shopify store, this is the shift worth internalizing: your checkout is a distribution asset. Carriers, warranty administrators, and pet-insurance MGAs all need to reach customers at the exact moment those customers are making a related decision. There are not many of those moments in a day. A checkout is one of them, and the retailer owns it.

The economics follow from that. When a policy or plan is sold through your cart, you are not paying a vendor to add a feature — you are collecting a fee from the party who wanted the placement. Rates vary by category and carrier, but the take on protection plans usually lands in the double digits as a share of the plan price, and on adjacent products like pet-insurance leads or prescription savings the payout is a fixed bounty per activation. Either way, the line lands as revenue, not COGS.

That inverts how most operators still think about it. "Insurance" sits on the mental list next to fraud tools and returns software — things you buy to reduce a loss. It should sit next to affiliate programs and payment surcharge revenue — things that pay you for the traffic and trust you already have.

Post-purchase email is not a substitute

The most common in-house version of this today is a post-purchase email. Order confirms, the customer gets a "protect your purchase" note from a third-party administrator a few hours later, some fraction click through and buy a plan. That flow works, mechanically. It is also a much smaller business than a checkout offer.

Public benchmarks are thin, but administrators who run both surfaces will tell you the same thing off the record: post-purchase attach on physical goods lands somewhere in the low single digits, while checkout attach on the same catalog runs several times higher. The reason is not clever copy. Buying decisions are made at the moment of purchase and unmade almost immediately after. An email that lands six hours later is competing against a customer who has already moved on.

If the merchant does not own the checkout surface, someone else — usually the warranty administrator, sometimes the platform — collects the delta.

The question worth asking

For most Shopify merchants, the honest answer to "are you capturing this?" is no, or partially. There is often a warranty program running for a subset of SKUs, or a pet-insurance link buried in a footer, and no one has looked at the numbers in a year.

The category is not new anymore. It is a $200 billion line item in 2025 with a plausible path to nearly a trillion by 2030, and the retailer's slice of it is not theoretical — it is whatever the merchant chooses to put in the cart. This is the space we work in at Flex Embedded, on both the pet and general-goods sides, so treat that as disclosure rather than neutrality. The useful exercise is not to pick a vendor this week. It is to look at your last quarter of orders, decide which categories a coverage or savings offer would actually fit, and figure out who is currently collecting the fee that offer would generate.

If it isn't you, that is the number to negotiate first.