Zip Takes BNPL Offline With Zip Card Debut

With the holiday shopping season approaching, buy now, pay later (BNPL) company Zip has debuted the Zip Card, its latest installment payment offering.

Issued by WebBank, the card extends Zip’s “pay-in-4” functionality offline with a physical card, the company said in a news release Tuesday (Oct. 25).

“The Zip app lets customers use the pay later service pretty much everywhere…even on shopping sites where Zip is not at the checkout option,” said Zip’s U.S. Chief Marketing Officer Jinal Shah. “With the Zip Card, we are offering customers access to another fair, transparent payment method in a familiar format to use in-store, specifically at stores that do not accept contactless or mobile phone payments.”

The company said the card allows installment payments at most brick-and-mortar retailers that accept Visa. including big box stores such as Home Depot and Walmart, as well as smaller local shops and restaurants.

This is happening at a moment when consumers are getting a bit smarter about their installment payment use, PYMNTS reported recently.

Among consumers that use BNPL more strategically are the ones with available open-to-buy on revolving credit cards but who recognize benefits in using installments instead.

Read more: BNPL at the Heart of the Great Consumer Credit Reset, Says Splitit CEO

For users with access to revolving credit, “their open to buy is going to shrink a little bit, but they’re still not going to be willing to pay interest,” Nandan Sheth, CEO at BNPL provider Splitit, told PYMNTS.

“They’re going to lean more toward, ‘I have credit … how can I leverage that credit without paying interest to extend my payments?’ Splitit and others that are trying to do something similar, I think we become a little bit more attractive for that segment and give them a unique way to leverage existing credit,” Sheth said.

Recent research by PYMNTS also found BNPL can offer a powerful incentive to consumers, especially when paired with buy buttons. Online shoppers who used a buy button when checking out finished their purchases in about half the time it took those who checked out via regular methods. Checkouts using the buy button were completed in just 68 seconds, on average, in this year’s second quarter, 17% faster than they were in the fourth quarter of 2020.