A few people have been surprised recently to find that we have laybuy - which means you can make an order and then pay it off over 6 months. Yes, I should have explained this earlier!
I have to confess I just assumed everyone used credit cards for this sort of "I want it but I need to pay in installments" thing, but it turns out half of you don't have them for various reasons, and also they charge high interest rates. The software we use for laybuy charges 1.9% of the total of your order.
It's a tiny bit glitchy because it's basically run by one guy who designed it for a different shopping platform than ours, but we've been using it now for well over 6 months and we've always had a happy customer at the end.
So, how does it work? Well, you see something you love and either can't afford all in one go, or it's on pre-order or made-to-order and you're not sure you want to risk all your cash and then I don't know, volcanoes or something.
(Seriously once time all our deliveries ran heinously late because of a volcano)
You add the items to your basket and hit "CHECK OUT" on the left, not the paypal button on the right.
Then follow the check-out process, which varies a bit depending on if you have an account or not (accounts win points and points mean prizes, but they're not compulsory)
You can add in any discount codes at this stage in the box on the right.
At the bottom left it "put it on lay-buy", so click on that and then follow it through.
Then it will show you an alarmingly blue screen. You can edit your payment plan; the slowest is a 20% deposit and then 5 further payments once a month.
Hit "PUT IT ON LAY-BUY" and whatever payment method you like and follow it through. The order will complete.
We get your order as normal but with a status "On Lay-buy". If your items were in stock, we put them in a separate area of the warehouse so they can't get accidentally sold to anyone else. If they are a pre-order or made to order it's electronically reserved for you and when it arrives, if you're on a payment plan it stays on the special shelves, or if you're paid up it goes straight out to you.
Once you're all paid up your order goes out.
Now, as a general rule, you have all the same rights as usual - you get 14 days after it arrives at your delivery address to decide if you want it, and the returns process is the same as usual.
As you know, hosiery, personalised or made to order items do have some restrictions on returns, but it's extremely rare we'd flat out refuse a return. I can't actually recall doing that in the last 5 years. Even stuff that's arrived damaged by the customer (very rare) we've generally given a voucher for.
You can edit the payment plan - a bit - it's hard to vary it much but if you want to cancel it, or pay up earlier, those things are doable.
The lay-buy contract does include the possibility of charging an admin fee if you cancel and, for example, we just made 5 special corsets for you that we now can't get rid of - but as yet we've never had to enact that as nobody has done anything that daft.
At the moment, ALL our payment methods actually run through paypal (even if they look like ours) so you are also protected by all of Paypal's procedures and policies.
This also means that if your paypal has paypal credit or paypal pay after delivery, you can apparently also do that! I do not have ANY of that so that you to S, who helped us out by letting us know and giving us a screenshot of what it looks like at their end. Second payment option down is "Pay after Delivery" which again, reduces your risks when things go wrong with volcanoes and postal deliveries.
I am reminded to point out that also if you have a time-limited discount code, and the item you love isn't available yet you can use the code (and indeed laybuy etc) to buy a voucher, which you can then redeem at its full value when, say, the Silk Audrey set in the picture at the top comes out!
Yes, things bought on a voucher can also be returned.
OK, so I hope that all makes sense, and let us know if you have any questions and 50/50 I will be able to answer them immediately versus I will have to go and look them up and possibly get really confused because Paypal do stuff we don't know about!
