An interesting article on the ABC News website today regarding Afterpay.
It appears that ASIC may step in so as to protect customers who cannot control their own spending habits.
Shonky behaviour indeed
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Where I used to work we considered allowing retail customers to pay via AfterPay (or any of the equivalents), however we opted not to for one simple reason - cost.
We allowed payment via Credit Card (it cost us about 20c / transaction, which we didn’t pass on) and PayPal (it cost us about 2.5%+30c, which we passed on most of) as well as other non instant payment methods (which we didn’t charge extra for).
Both PayPal AU and the ACCC itself from memory have clear guidance that we were allowed to charge extra, as long as it was less than we were charged.
Not so with AfterPay and similar systems. They typically blow PayPal out of the water, wanting to charge vendors ~6% for an order a customer chooses to buy with AfterPay. And, unlike PayPal etc they say collecting a surcharge from the customer to offset that cost, is against their ToS.
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If one considers the claim by Afterpay that the vast majority of their customers pay on time and do not incur late payment fees, and your advice that they charge participating merchants around 6% of the value of the transactions, and the advice in the ABC article that the merchant fees account for around 75% of their income, then they must be charging some eyewatering amounts for late payment fees.
They receive around 25% of their income from the handful of customers who do not pay on time which, according to Afterpay, represents just 5% of their customers.
Looks like they have been able to replace the 80/20 principle with the new Afterpay 95/5 principle.
Might be cheaper to borrow from the Mafia.
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UGH. This kind of stuff is why I stay well away from Afterpay, Zippay, and all those “payday loans” mobs. They dont even make sense. I’ll keep my hideously expensive commbank CC instead.
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I used to have one of those 
Eventually (after letting it creep up to a 40k limit) I needed to refinance, and discovered I was a much better loan prospect after I cancelled the card and changed it to a debit credit card.
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So what does it tell us about the type/mindset/etc of a vendor who is prepared to use AfterPay ?
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Hehe, perhaps that there’s a little too much markup on their products.
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