Many of the customers of cosmetics e-retailer Beautylish are shopping for personal use, but others are makeup artists shopping for products she plans to use at freelance gigs. That causes a cash flow issue, says Nils Johnson, Beautylish’s founder, because the customer has to pay for the product up front before she gets paid for her work.
Johnson wasn’t able to offer his own financing solution but he knew the team at Affirm, a consumer finance service, was developing a service that split payments into more manageable chunks. That service, called Affirm Split Pay, officially launches today.
Max Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal—now owned by eBay Inc.—started Affirm in 2012 to make credit more accessible to consumers. About half of the company’s senior team is former PayPal employees, but they represent just a small percentage of the company’s 32 total employees, Levchin says. Affirm now offers Split Pay, which literally splits the purchase price, plus a small amount of interest dependent on the individual consumer, into monthly payments.
Read the full story on internetretailer.com.
ABBY CALLARD 