Decided to try out the service Bill Me Later recently and I was surprised by how easy it was to use. As of this writing, there’s 33 online retailers who accept Bill Me Later as a form of payment. The name sort of says it all, but instead of paying via credit card or online check, you’ll agree to pay the invoice later. It is a (very short, actually) credit application very similar to a credit card with minimum payments if you want to go that route or you can pay the whole thing off within a short period of time (20-30 days) and not face any finance charges.

To use Bill Me Later you just put in the last 4 of your Social Security Number, your name, and address and Bill Me Later makes a credit decision based on the purchase. The whole process takes a few seconds and a decision is returned. If it’s a yes, then the online retailer is paid and a Bill Me Later account is created. In my case about twenty minutes after the transaction which occured on a weeknight in the evening, I received a call to confirm that I had ordered something from the online retailer and wanted to pay via Bill Me Later (nice security, I like it!). I said yes, and about a week later the item arrived and my account was created and available via Bill Me Later. It appears that there are different “no payment necessary until ___ deals” like the ad below shows:



BTW, don’t get too excited about the computer ad demo from overstock.com above because the monitor is not included. I hate it when they sell computers this way! Show me exactly what I’m buying and nothing extra. This would be a killer deal with a 17″ flat screen monitor.

Anyway, be on the lookout for Bill Me Later, I’d put this as a company to watch in 2005, assuming like any other credit provider that they give credit to the right people and can maintain their solvency. Some people are very concerned about security and giving their credit card number out online and this provides a method to pay later without providing their credit card info. Grade: A

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