Customer financing: Give customers more purchasing power

Chris Leveille, general manager of Homestead Gardens, says generally, training the independent garden center’s more than 200 employees on how to use new programs can be challenging. When he first heard of Blispay, a new digital financing option for customers, he thought it might be complicated. After meeting with the Blispay team, however, he was pleasantly surprised.

“We selected Blispay because of ease of use. It was very simple for us to deploy, and we found it to be the right option for our customers,” Leveille says. “Getting the stores up and running was easy.”

Blispay provides financing to customers for purchases of $199 or more. Promoting Blispay is easy and free for merchants. Signs in the garden center let customers know that financing is available through Blispay, and the transaction can be handled just like a regular credit card payment. Since Blispay is a Visa product, the garden center pays their standard credit card processing fees like they do for any other Visa credit card. This also means there are no accounting or back-office processes associated with offering Blispay, unlike some other financing offerings.

Because customers can apply for Blispay from its website or the company’s app on their smart phones, Homestead does not have to handle or track sensitive customer information.

About a week after meeting with the Blispay team, Homestead Gardens, with stores in Davidsonville and Severna Park, Md., received the materials they needed to start training managers and staff.

“Within 72 hours, we had signage on the floor and were talking about Blispay with our customers,” Leveille says. “I have to say that one of the great benefits about Blispay is there was nothing for us to do on the back end.”

More important than ease of use are the results. Leveille says he’s seeing customers make larger purchases this season.

“Looking at customer histories, I’ve found that Blispay users are spending more now that they have a business payment option,” he says. “Landscaping can be a pretty expensive endeavor. Blispay provides one more opportunity for our customers to see that they can create a beautiful, landscaped home, and Homestead can make it affordable with Blispay as a partner.”

Blispay’s program gives Homestead shoppers more purchasing power.

“Blispay has given us another way to extend our relationship with our customer,” Leveille says. “We know that it’s a way they’ll come back to us again, knowing they have that purchasing power in their pocket to come back after Christmas for their patio sets or later in the summer for more plants for the patio or garden. It’s pretty amazing.”