AfterPay took fashion retail by storm a few years ago. Their initial focus was online and then moved to in-store. last year, they took over Touch, bringing them into the focus of newsagency businesses and others.
ZipPay and Oxipay have joined the fray and are providing terrific over the counter LayBy alternatives. I say terrific because the customer takes the goods immediately. This reduces storage costs, eliminates the possibility of in-store damage and frees capital for you. It also means you are not subject to tight LayBy refund regulations.
The risk is that the type of funding for these buy now pay later programs sits in a grey area, an area that I expect will eventually become regulated. For now, however, POS software integrated buy now pay later makes it easy for you to offer the service an pitch something that may be more commercially valuable to you than LayBy.
In one of the websites with which I am involved, we started offering Oxipay late last year. In a few short months it was accounting for 14% of revenue and led to a net increase in purchases, capturing sales that would have otherwise been lost as the purchasers did not have the available funds at that time.
Bringing this in-store, into a newsagency, has not been without its challenges given the mix of products available and the rules some financiers have in place for what they will fund. However, work has been done to serve the needs of the financiers and ensure retail businesses like newsagents lies have access to buy now pay later.
Retail is changing in the payments space. Reducing friction is the name of the game. Offering a service like Oxipay is key is reducing friction.