While the concept of credit isn’t foreign to offline purchases, especially in retail shopping scenarios, there is at least one company extending an option of paying later for consumers. i4commerce.com:

Whether they are shopping online or by phone, consumers prefer to skip the work and worry of entering lengthy credit card numbers, and love the comfort and convenience of using Bill Me Later.

The customer can pay within 25 days and avoid any finance charge or spread the payments over month(s) with a fixed rate of 17.99% (as of this writing, anyway)

As for the merchant side of things, the FAQ page breaks down that a custom coding solution can take “80 man hours” to implement. This should be sufficient to scare away most online-only companies. There are some third party solutions that work with it, but from what I could see all signs point to whitepapers and “call us” for quotes which in my experience means the prices are in the high four to five figure (and up) prices. And at the end of the day, chargebacks are still a possibility, which is a bit disheartening. The customer can still claim they didn’t order the merchandise or in the case of a web subscription — didn’t visit/use the website. This is a big problem with all online payments: the ease of which consumers can simply deny they ever used/visited the website. Until there is some other way — like card swiping at the keyboard or biometrics — of definitively pinning down the purchase of goods and/or services online, this type of fraud is always going to exist. And yes I do realize that there are legitimate cases of identity fraud online. A better, more secure solution would protect both consumers and merchants. The sad part is that some of these solutions do exist but aren’t in widespread adoption at this time.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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