Here’s an idea: Online layby

I'm sitting in the Christchurch airport waiting on a flight delayed over an hour...thankfully AirNZ did the right thing and gave us Lounge passes, so I'm chillaxing with a Stella and free WiFi.

Browsing a list of expiring domains I noticed that layby.co.nz was coming up and it occured that there could be a business in providing online layby facilities for retail stores. Not sure if layby is a concept widely used around the world, but lots of retail stores in NZ will let you 'layby' an item over some period of time, say 3 months or so. Over that time you pay off the layby and then collect the goods. Honestly, I'm not sure why people do that...why not just save up and then go and buy it, but it seems to be popular in fashion retail especially so I suppose it is people who must have an item and are worried it will sell out before they can save up.

Anyway, why not handle all this for the retail stores? It would work like this:

1. Consumer goes into store and requests to put an item on layby.
2. Store clerk takes their email address and logs into the web site, adds detail of the product, and the cost.
3. Consumer gets an email with a link to confirm their acceptance of the layby terms (configurable by the merchant), and then to submit payment on the item via card or paypal. They can then return at any time and make payments. The system would probably also issue reminders periodically.
4. Once paid off the store is notified and the consumer given a receipt to take into the store to collect the layby'd item. At this point we pay the store less our 10% handling fee. If it worked it would be a wonderfully cashflow positive business.
5. At anytime the store would also be able to get reports of all items on layby and the status of payments etc.

There's no doubt other moving parts to this, but I'm on Stella #2 so that will have to do. As I type this it also occurs to me that most layby is probably done by teenage girls who don’t have credit cards or paypal accounts which might be a fatal flaw. Oh well, I got a blog post out of it.

pic by Brave New Films