Buy now, pay later

Learn about "Buy now, pay later" (BNPL) as payment method in the context of Accounting as a Service.

“Buy now, pay later” or BNPL for short, refers to a payment service where customers are able to experience the goods before they have to pay for them. In general there are three types of BNPL solutions:

  • Open invoice: The customer gets his goods and may pay - usually via bank transfer - in a certain period of time, e.g. 14 days after the delivery.
  • Direct Debit: The merchant or a payment provider debits the SEPA bank account of the customer after the delivery - the payment is more convenient for the customer, but leads to a debit even if the goods will be returned.
  • Instalments: The customer gets his goods and pays in a specified number of instalment, e.g. over 6 months.

Branded BNPL Solution

Offering store credit to good customers has been a technique used by store owners for many years to show good faith and increase loyalty among their customers. With ecommerce, however, taking the credit risk on yourself as a merchant is a lot more risky. That’s where branded solutions such as Riverty or Klarna help merchants. Both, Riverty and Klarna are integrated in Accounting as a Service.

Labeled solutions offer the fastest and easiest way to integrate BNPL services to your store. What is more, customers know these providers and inherently see your store as even more trustworthy as a result. A payment service such as Riverty will take on the credit risk by themselves, generates the invoice and also takes care of the customer experience in post checkout. A branded solution offers more convenience to the customer as well, thanks to being able to use the payment service in multiple stores and manage all their purchases in one place.

White-label solution

Another option is to provide your very own white-label solution, where the customer does not see the payment provider interacting with the merchant and the merchant takes the default risk. Accounting as a Service allows this option as well and takes care of the additional processes such as risk scoring, commercial dunning, payment matching and legal collection processes (currently available with open invoice and SEPA direct debit payments, instalments are not available yet).

Using a white-label solution, the merchant can generate the invoice or allow Accounting as a Service to do that in the name of the merchant. In the first case, please ensure the bank details and reasons for transfer are properly filled along with the invoice and customer number to enable Accounting as a Service to match incoming payments automatically.

See also