Customer financing

Wondering how to offer customer financing? Is it suitable for your business? What are the pros and cons? We answer common customer financing questions, explain the different approaches, and outline easy steps to get started.

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What is it?

Why offer it?

Is it right for my business?

For your industry

The different approaches

How to implement it

What is customer financing?

Customer financing is a way for businesses to offer payment plans to pay for products or services over time. It’s a useful and increasingly essential tool helps businesses keep customers happy, sell more, and to avoid losing existing customers.

Why offer customer financing?

The biggest reason to offer customer financing is it typically helps you sell more. It makes what you sell accessible to more customers, which in turn, increases your revenue. It also increases the average order value – customers tend to buy more when you make payments bite-sized and more affordable. Customere are increasingly expecting this as a standard option – so not offering customer financing can lead customers choosing your competitors instead.

Is customer financing right for your business?

While most businesses typically benefit from offering some sort of customer financing, it’s not always suitable. Consider what you sell, where and how many customers you have and any risks involved.

The best way to see if it’s right for you is to try it out. Implement a quick and easy option and see how it affects your sales and revenue over a few months. Most businesses will typically see more overall revenue and a larger customer base.

Customer financing for different types of businesses and industries

Businesess in most industries tend to benefit by offering customer financing options – we go into more depth on each industry below with how you could structure customer financing, potential benefits, and more.

👩‍💼Customer financing for service businesses

🧭Customer financing for travel and tourism businesses

🕺Customer financing for contractors

🛍️Customer financing for eCommerce businesses

🏺Customer financing for high value items

The three different approaches to customer financing – more info and pros & cons of each approach

Using buy now pay later companies for customer financing

Effective but limited. High fees, no control.

Control your own customer financing

(with easy to use software)

Retain full control and pay low fees.

Using a traditional provider for customer financing

Usually complicated, expensive, and clunky.

How to offer customer financing when you’re using different platforms, or with different tools

WooCommerce customer financing

Shopify customer financing

Eventbrite customer financing

Offer customer financing using Jotform or other form tools

Offer customer financing on your own terms, in minutes.

Try Paythen now with a fee-free trial.

We’ll ask you to connect your Stripe account or create a new one once you sign up. Paythen works with Stripe.

Easy payment plans

Offer your customers a flexible payment plan set by you, to increase conversions and sales.

Automated reminders & emails

We automatically send handy reminders before payments & follow-ups if a payment fails.

Integrate with other apps

Send Paythen data to over 7,000+ other apps with our Zapier integration.

Encourage early repayments

Offer customers on a payment plan an easy way to repay early at any time – increasing your cashflow.

Change payment info easily

Your customers can change their card info anytime they want, with zero time spent by your team.

We get paid when you do

With our simple, low 2%
fee, we only get paid when you do. No fixed or hidden fees. No fees during your free trial either.

Discover more features or see our FAQs

New Find Customer Zapier action allows for more automated workflows

Zapier

If you use Paythen with your ecommerce store either via the email based flow (eg: for Shopify) or our plugin (like WooCommerce), the flow typically involves customers completing the checkout with the payment plan option chosen, and then either being shown or emailed their payment plan link.

For WooCommerce, the order status automatically changes if they complete their payment plan payment, but for email based workflows like Shopify, Webflow, Eventbrite and any others, once a customer is emailed their payment plan link, you had to manually check if they had paid by logging into the Paythen dashboard, and then manually following up.

You can now fully automate this process with our new Find Customer action available in Zapier. In your zap where you send customers the Paythen payment plan link, just add a short delay after the current flow (eg: wait for 10 minutes) and then use the Find Customer action to check if the customer exists in Paythen. If they do, you can update your eCommerce store order – eg: adding a note and/or tag in Shopify and passing the customer’s Paythen link for reference or in other platforms, you can update the status of the order directly too.

If the customer doesn’t exist, this means they haven’t signed up to their payment plan yet – you can set it up in Zapier to send them a reminder with custom text in it and include the payment plan link again. You can then continue to do this multiple times for a few hours or even a few days after the order was placed, and cancel the order and more as needed if the customer doesn’t pay eventually.

The same setup works when you’re using Paythen with any third party form tool, or any other custom workflows where you show / email them the payment plan link. You can now just add a short delay, then check if they have paid and exist as a customer in Paythen, and if not, trigger one or more reminders and take further steps as needed.

This process required manual admin till now – but can now be fully automated, saving you time. To get started, open your Zapier account and in the action step, choose “Find Customer”. You can modify your existing zap by adding a delay after you send the payment plan link, then checking if the customer exists in Paythen, and then either updating the order in your eCommerce platform or other system (find order and add a note in Shopify for example), or if not found, you can then trigger another reminder email with custom text. You can then set up further steps to check again, say in 1 hour, 4 hours, 2 days, etc to continue automated follow-ups as needed.

If you’re not sure how to do this with your workflow, just reach out to us via the chat icon and we’ll help you get set up.