Amazon’s first bricks-and-mortar clothing and fashion store, ‘Amazon Style’, is set to open in Los Angeles later this year. Incorporating the use of its online shopping app, QR codes, and a myriad of other innovative technologies and machine learning algorithms, Amazon Style will aim to create a more pleasant and personalised physical shopping experience Shoppers will be able to use
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The new Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) fee the federal government is considering could hurt consumers by a whopping $450 million. This is how much customers would pay if merchants passed on their BNPL fees. This new fee will not only disproportionately hurt young people as their economic future has never been more uncertain, but it will likely result in them being driven
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You may have heard about a new peak body advocating for Australia’s tech businesses; the Tech Council of Australia. The Tech Council of Australia is a recently formed peak body primarily representing Australia’s tech sector. However they also represent firms in the broader tech ecosystem, including venture capitalists, advisers and tech-enabled businesses outside the tech sector. You may have read
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Consumer groups are designed to provided consumers with advocacy, support and often collective power. We believe most Australian consumer groups do a great job at this. However, we believe the concern regarding potential risks of Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) use can be overstated and the positive effect BNPL is having on consumers, under-appreciated. Consumer group Choice are currently surveying their members about
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This week there was news that Zip and Afterpay have partnered with Way Forward, the preeminent Australian debt solutions charity. This partnership is set to further strengthen Zip and Afterpay’s existing hardship programs Way Forward is a not for-profit-organisation helping people in financial difficulty become debt free. They offer Australians debt advice and free financial support to help manage their
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Recent news of ANZ Bank finally capitulating and announcing their own version of Buy-Now-Pay-Later could be considered the canary in the coal mine for credit cards. At a time when Australians managed to wipe $1.1 Billion off their credit card debt in a single month, it could be argued this archaic form of providing credit could be on it’s way
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Please refer to my article “There’s no hardship or protections with BNPL if you get into trouble” where I talked about the ‘BNPL incentive’. BNPL companies need customers to be able to pay off their debt. Which is why your spending limit on a product like Afterpay starts low, and you need to make your first instalment payment upfront. Many
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There’s a consistent theme in regards to BNPL which often pits it as a predatory consumer product that doesn’t care for its users. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. BNPL needs its users to have a good experience for it to maintain. We thought we would take a look into the idea that “There’s no hardship or protections
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Industrial action, COVID-19 disruptions and Christmas-level parcel volumes every week mean the lengthy delays people are experiencing in regards to their delivery times are here to stay, according to the boss of logistics software company Shippit. That’s why we here at SmartWayToPay think now’s the time to be considering shopping for Christmas. So what’re some top tips to saving on
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SmartWayToPay is calling on the federal government to cap credit card interest rates at 10% after ASIC recently confirmed that 1.9 million Australians were in persistent credit card debt. This comes at a time when it appears total personal credit card debt accruing interest in Australia appears to be locked at a consistent $20 billion, as it has remained for
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