I must have missed a PayPal announcement as I’ve only just realised that PayPal Pay After Delivery (or Pay Later) is live in the UK. In fact yesterday evening I used it to buy some socks from Thingimigigs (who we wrote about a few days ago).
We noted back in January this year that Pay After Delivery was coming to the UK, but we’d not heard that the feature was live and available to all. Looking at the sign up page we suspect PayPal probably aren’t ready to fully launch the feature as it has the old PayPal logo on it and the T’s and C’s refer to $s instead of £s. That didn’t stop me signing up for PayPal Pay After Delivery and using it though.
Once you’ve signed up for Pay After Delivery it’ll appear whenever you make a qualifying purchase with PayPal. Simply choose to pay later and PayPal will pay the seller immediately (Don’t worry Rach, the cash from PayPal should be in the Thingimigigs PayPal account already!).
14 days later PayPal will debit the money from your bank account, they’ll email you about four days prior so that there are no nasty surprises if you’ve forgotten.
I’m not sure why I’d use Pay After Delivery in the future, I much prefer to pay for items at the time I purchase them. However there’s a certain attraction to keeping the money in my bank account for the extra two weeks, although in reality the miserly amount of interest paid on current accounts means it really doesn’t make the slightest difference. However for those people who get paid monthly I can see the attraction of paying a week before payday knowing you’ll have funds in your account two weeks later when PayPal want the cash.
It’s worth noting that PayPal Pay After Delivery is different to PayPal Credit (Previously known as Bill Me Later). Pay After Delivery is not a financing agreement with no interest charged, it’s merely an alternative to paying before delivery.
Would you appreciate the ability to buy now and pay when you’ve received the goods? Will you be making use of PayPal Pay After Delivery?
7 Responses
I have been using Pay after Delivery in the UK for over a year now (must have been in an early roll out group). I don’t get offered the option on all purchases so there must be some logic around when PayPal is happy to take the risk. It generally works well although I have been caught out a few times and had a nasty shock in my bank account!
Me too! Turned it off after getting a dominoes pizza, didn’t seem right paying 2 weeks after I ate it 😀
I’ve also had the option to use pay after delivery for over two years now. I wasn’t given the option to enable it, it was just automatically switched on one day. The option to disable it didn’t work and I had to fight long and hard with a PayPal rep to get it disabled (that was back in 2012)! I was thinking that the sellers weren’t getting their money until after delivery either, so I didn’t want to put anyone out and prompt negative feedback. PayPal didn’t explain to me that it was only my payment that was delayed, not the seller’s.
The service I received from PayPal regarding the whole issue was just terrible, and at no point was I told it was a trial.
I’ve also had it for yonks, but I too turned it off. I buy tons of stuff online and keeping a track of how much money I actually have available to spend becomes a real pain. If I wanted to pay for goods later I’d have used a credit card!
Dan must be having a lay in…. I’ve been waiting for a time traveling comment from our resident Whovian 😀
My concern on this is will sellers start to see a rise in returns between day 10 and 14 after the sale when the payment reminder hits and and the returns period is still valid.