While the Apple Watch is possibly the most popular (or best-known) choice—its new Series 9 is due to be released this September—there are plenty of other smartwatches on the market that offer a range of different features, some of which come from tried-and-true timepiece names.

Citizen CZ Smart

Unveiled at this year’s Consumer Electronic Show, Citizen’s Gen-2 CZ Smart watch (above, and also at top), with a range of touchscreen Sport, Casual, and Hybrid Sport styles, won nine Best of CES and Editor’s Choice awards. The timepieces feature a built-in self-case advisor through the proprietary CZ Smart YouQ wellness app, developed using research pioneered by NASA’s Ames Research Center and AI built within IBM Watson Studio.

The watch is designed to help its wearer understand and anticipate patterns of fatigue and alertness: It can offer customized insights and personalized strategies to help manage stress, set activity goals, and encourage self-care and well-being. The watch learns over time by aggregating wearer data, helping to cater to wearers more personally.

The Sport, Casual, and Hybrid watches are available now, and Citizen plans to introduce five additional CZ Smart Hybrid Sport styles this fall.

Garmin Instinct Solar

Not from a traditional watch brand but rather one associated with GPS, the latest offering from Garmin is topping all the lists of smartwatches to consider in 2023. Ideal for those spending a large amount of time outdoors, the watch is capable of lasting up to 51 days on solar-powered battery, has three satellite tracking systems perfect for hikers and adventurers, and offers a wealth of fitness and activity tracking apps. This is only one of a number of new smartwatches released by Garmin this year, including new models for runners, new sizes for its popular Epix Pro, new colors for its petite Lily watch, and more.

Withings ScanWatch

French company Withings specializes in products that monitor health, from sleep sensors to blood pressure monitors to smart scales—and smartwatches. Though it was acquired by Nokia in 2016, founder Eric Carreel purchased the brand back in 2018, making it once again a privately owned company.

One of Withings’ latest offerings is the ScanWatch, a highly rated, relatively affordable option that became available for purchase in the United States only in the past year, for those who need to actively monitor a health condition. It’s the first analog watch with a clinically tested and approved electrocardiogram, automatically detecting changes in heart rate and oxygen saturation level; it’s also the first Withings watch to be FDA cleared. The watch contains a respiratory scanner to monitor breathing disturbances and offers advanced sleep tracking, in addition to the more traditional fitness tracker features. While ideal for those monitoring their health, the watch also offers coaching apps that help wearers improve their fitness, making it a fine and stylish choice for anyone.

Fossil Gen 6 Smartwatch

Coming in around $300, Fossil’s Gen 6 smartwatch is a fairly budget-friendly option for shoppers looking to get acquainted with the concept of wearable tech.

Powered by Google, the piece is available in a range of styles and materials, from pink silicone to stainless steel; some models include a leather strap or interchangeable dials. The watches offer constant heart rate and sleep health tracking, boast built-in Alexa and Google Pay features, and can make and take phone calls.

Lagos Smart Caviar watch bracelet

While not a smartwatch on its own, Lagos’ just-released watch bracelets are worth a mention for those looking to dress up their Apple Watch. In the brand’s signature Caviar style, the bracelet is available in a range of metals and with or without diamonds or gemstones; some even incorporate colorful ceramic links in shades such as lilac, ultramarine blue, and (hi, Barbie!) pink. Prices start at $650 for a stainless steel style, and run up to $40,000 for an all-18k gold and diamond version.

Top: Citizen’s CZ Smart Casual touchscreen watch

Around 2004, shortly after the first dot-com bubble burst, Sodhani decided to go backpacking in India. The climate for tech startups was “horrible,” he tells JCK, and it seemed like a good time to reconnect with his roots. He was due to fly home via Mumbai when his father told him that a job at a local diamond company was available to him, if he wanted it.

“I’m like, ‘Nice try, dad,’” Sodhani says. “But my sister said, ‘Why don’t you take the job and then you can stay in Bombay?’ I started the next morning at Rosy Blue.”

Working at one of the world’s largest diamond manufacturers was a promising start to a career that soon segued into the fine jewelry business. In 2006, Sodhani founded ILA, a diamond jewelry brand currently sold at Saks Fifth Avenue, Moda Operandi, Eliza Page, and scores of additional jewelry stores around the United States as well as internationally.

In January 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Sodhani brought his various interests full circle with the debut of Unbridaled AI, a company offering diamond curation software, Unbridaled Diamonds, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Designed to simplify and streamline the process of selecting the best diamonds at the best price in real time, the technology is focused on shortening the selection process and helping retailers close the sale. Thanks to its numerous sightholder and diamond manufacturing partners, the company ships diamonds directly from India and overseas to the United States.

“As an engineer, someone who came from a deep technical background, I realized the state of software in our industry was really ancient,” Sodhani tells JCK. “It was hard to sell a diamond to a customer for an engagement ring, and it was also difficult to explain the intricacies of a diamond so that they felt educated and comfortable enough to buy. I thought there had to be a better way.”

Sodhani reasoned that the amount of data available on certified diamonds would be enough to give a computer capable of machine learning, a subset of AI that involves training machines to learn from data, the ability to select the best diamonds, thereby freeing up the time a retailer had to spend sourcing them.

“There’s a lot of data on these certified diamonds from the labs on things like angles and inclusions, and sightholders have even more info: ‘Is the diamond eye clean? What is the shape?’” Sodhani says. “With all this data, we hypothesized that artificial intelligence should be able to look through all this data and find the best diamond. It’s what a gemologist would do if you told him what you wanted. He’d look at what’s available and find the best one. So we started writing software and using AI to see if it could provide good results, and it turns out, it provides amazing results. We patented it.”

The curation technology is designed to work online as well as in a physical environment “because every store will have different requirements,” Sodhani says. “Some people, for example, will only want to show H color and above. The system is flexible and you can train it and then it figures out the best diamonds.”

“Unbridaled Diamonds takes an appointment that typically took two to three weeks down to 10 to 15 minutes,” Sodhani wrote in a follow-up email.

But that was just the beginning. Sodhani realized that as his business grew, it required more nuanced and robust management software. “I pretty much bought every piece of software out there to run a diamond jewelry company and they were all horrible,” he says, referring to software that could be used to manage inventory, manufacturing, shipping, invoicing, etc. Once again, Sodhani began writing his own software.

“We built it to manage our own operations but realized we were onto something big,” Sodhani says. “Most small- to medium-size enterprises run their businesses off Excel or some kind of spreadsheet; they don’t have software to run their business. That’s the space we’re filling.”

The company introduced Unbridaled OS at the recent JCK Las Vegas show. “It’s jewelry management software specifically designed for our industry, and it syncs with modern software that most people would use, mainly Shopify and Quickbooks,” Sodhani says.

“Most times, if you have Excel or Quickbooks, you don’t have a good sense of the pulse of your business,” he adds. “It’s a challenge to understand what’s going on. Because our strength is in AI or machine learning, we’re building an AI copilot inside Unbridaled OS that’s constantly analyzing your data. Everything is integrated and stored in our system. So we know exactly what’s happening.”

The software can track inventory across multiple locations, manage deadlines, and leverage analytics to deliver insights into sales performance, among other key features.

Sodhani says his goal is to help owners run their businesses better. “An owner has to wear so many hats: designing, sales, manufacturing, sourcing,” he says. “How do you manage all those and grow a company? You need help and that is where these AI assistants come in.”

The palm recognition service, called Amazon One, uses technology that creates a “palm signature” by capturing “surface-area details like lines and ridges, as well as subcutaneous features such as vein patterns,” the company said on its website. The palm signature is linked to a consumer’s Whole Foods account and accompanying credit card.

Amazon claimed the service is “100 times more accurate” than scanning irises of people’s eyes. “Your palm’s unique characteristics, such as creases, friction ridges, and underlying vein network, are a result of independent biological processes,” it said. “Even identical twins with the same DNA do not have the same palm surface and vein patterns.… After millions of interactions among hundreds of thousands of enrolled identities, we have not had a single false positive.”

The company even developed “liveness detection,” by which the technology can distinguish between actual palms and 3D-printed replicas.

The Amazon One service is currently available at 200 Whole Foods stores, as well as a handful of other retailers, such as Panera Bread, which has installed the technology in two locations. It’s been used about 3 million times to date.

All of this has, of course, raised privacy concerns. In 2021, Senators Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) wrote to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy asking whether the e-tail giant planned to use the collected information for “advertising and tracking purposes.” They also questioned Amazon’s plan to store palm data in the cloud, as “data security is particularly important when it comes to immutable customer data, like palm prints.”

Amazon countered that the palm-print info is “not used by Amazon for marketing purposes” and that it will not share this data with third parties—including government demands, unless required to comply with a legal order.

“When you use Amazon One at third-party locations, Amazon doesn’t track what you do or buy after entering the location,” according to FAQs on the Amazon website. “That data is not associated with your biometric identity, and we built Amazon One that way intentionally.”

The company has also asserted that its data is secured by Amazon Web Services Cloud, and that only select employees with “specialized expertise” have access to that data.

Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017.

(Photo courtesy of Amazon)

Among the ways ChatGPT, which recently released an app, can help retailers: writing social media posts, brainstorming ad copy, reworking past content, generating content ideas, crafting product descriptions, improving copy, and producing team documentation of procedures.

But the tool has its downsides. ChatGPT “can be biased,” Shaheen said. ”It can be inaccurate and delusional. The data in ChatGPT only goes back to 2021. A lot has happened in two years.”

The tool can also be repetitious and slow. And users should always be aware that their data is not secure. “It says in its terms and conditions that it is keeping track of all the things put in there,” Shaheen said. “So if you have something proprietary, don’t enter it.”

Success on ChatGPT relies on exact “prompt engineering,” she said.

“Prompts are a set of instructions,” she explained. “You have to carefully craft your set of prompts. It’s all about the directions, what you want it to do.”

Shaheen likened choosing prompts to asking a genie for a wish. If you were wishing for a diamond, you would want to specify quality and size. If you are looking to write a good product description, you need to specify that you want copy that’s engaging and conversational, benefit-oriented, specific and factual, unique and creative, and evidence-based.

One oft-used trick she mentioned: “Tell ChatGPT to act like a person with a specific background or level of experience.” For instance, if you get a negative review on a social media network and are not sure how to respond, ask the bot to create an even-keeled reply like a customer service person with 20 years’ experience would.

Shaheen also addressed the differences between ChatGPT-3.5, the free version, and the newer ChatGPT-4, which costs $20 per month. “The quality of the writing is better on ChatGPT-4,” she said.

She advised users to back everything up and use the “data export” function. In the end, she noted, “ChatGPT is a tool, not a replacement for people.”

(Photograph by Camilla Sjodin)

When it comes to watches, you could also consider Walker an early adopter. He recalls wearing a watch even as a child, fascinated with the fake Rolex his father had brought home from a Shanghai business trip. The fakes fell away and Walker kept wearing watches, moving up in brand as his career flourished.

“I bought a watch with my first real bonus at Google,” Walker says. “It maybe wasn’t the best financial decision, but I wanted to commemorate the occasion.”

Watches grew from a hobby to a near obsession, Walker says. As someone who enjoys making things, he admired a watch’s external beauty and the impressive mechanicals on the inside.

“If you take care of it, a watch can last forever. There’s such a level of craftsmanship,” he says. “It represented the opposite of my job with screens and technology. I fell in love with how rational it was and the investment side of it. If you buy the right pieces at the right price, they go up in value. You get that joy and expression of who you are, as well.”

Six years after joining Google TV and driving the product to more than 100 million active users, Walker made the leap to cofounding Bezel in 2022. Bezel is described as a technology-first online watch marketplace with a mission to provide a trusted buying experience and best-in-class customer service.

In addition to Walker, Bezel’s executive team includes chief financial officer and chief operating officer Chase Pion and chief technology officer Darryl Johnson. The company is backed by a variety of investors, including singer John Legend, former head of Christie’s watches John Reardon, and Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin, says Walker.

As CEO, Walker says he focuses on the company’s long-term vision, its product, and its brand. What he enjoys most about his role is working with experts in watches and in technology, and learning from both.

The demand for watches has grown exponentially over the past two decades, Walker says, especially with celebrities, CEOs, and the general public showing an interest in watch collecting and enjoyment. Walker says his first forays into collecting watches were challenging, given that the early online marketplace felt too archaic, complicated, and intimidating.

“As a budding new collector, learning everything from scratch was a scary process. This was one of the largest purchases of my life, and it wasn’t a comfortable space for a newcomer,” Walker says. “I looked at a company like StockX, which sells collectible sneakers with an authenticated marketplace model, and that felt like a trusted source. So I thought, why don’t we build something like that for watches?”

Bezel can be the solution to those issues, Walker says. Its strict authentication process offers transparency and trust, he says.

“We like to say we’re wildly transparent,” Walker says, from the online workflow that a customer can track to interactions on the app to customer service that lets the buyer and seller ask questions throughout the process.

Here’s how it works: After a watch is purchased on the Bezel website or app, the seller ships the watch to Bezel, which examines it and verifies its authenticity. The Bezel team includes in-house authenticators and watchmakers who have worked for Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Hodinkee and bring decades of experience in the industry, Walker says.

Bezel users can browse listings for more than $150 million worth of watches, from brands including Rolex, Audemars Piguet, Patek Philippe, and Cartier. Prices may range from $2,500 to millions of dollars. The site also offers educational content and stories of famous watch wearers and collectors, from Cardi B to the late Princess Diana. Users can talk to Bezel’s client specialists, who help with sourcing and personal shopping.

“We are modern and technology-forward for the longtime collector, but we never forget about first-time buyers,” Walker says. “You’re buying a really beautiful, celebratory thing. It should be an experience that you feel good about and remember.”

Top: Quaid Walker left Google to start the online watch marketplace Bezel, which he says is benefiting from Gen-Z and millennial interest in watch collecting. (Photos courtesy of Bezel)

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Everledger’s Australian affiliate entered administration—the local version of bankruptcy— and a U.K. affiliate began a windup, following an investor pullout, Kemp confirms. But the company intends to make it through those processes and has no plans to liquidate, she says.

“Everledger is here,” Kemp says. “I am the largest shareholder, and I’m not going anywhere. We have seven entities in five countries, and some are being wound up and others are being restructured.”

She stresses that Everledger is continuing to provide services for its customers. “The technology is live and has been since this event happened in March. All of that is uninterrupted. I have had conversations with every one of our customers.”

The company’s issues stem from an investor yanking its funding, Kemp says. “We had a legal agreement, and we feel there’s been a breach of that agreement,” she says. “We will let the legal process run its course.”

Kemp believes Everledger will have many issues settled by May 31—just days before the JCK Las Vegas show, which she plans to attend.

Founded in 2015, Everledger initially focused on tracking diamonds and gems with a digital record backed by blockchain. It has provided tracking services for GIA, Brilliant Earth, Provenance Proof, and a small diamond project involving a 137-person village.

But it has broadened its focus and now tracks everything from batteries to art and other luxury products.

According to Crunchbase, it raised at least $27 million from a variety of funders, including the Australian government.

News of Everledger filing for administration was originally reported by the Australian Financial Review.

(Photo courtesy of Everledger)

“ChatGPT is 100 times smarter than the smartest person,” said Saeks, president and CEO of Prime Concepts Group, a marketing agency. “People always ask me if AI is going to replace humans. No, it’s going to replace humans who aren’t using it.

“You are not going to put the genie back in the bottle. This is not going away. It’s out now.”

ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence programs can help companies “automate tasks, improve efficiency, and make better decisions,” said Saeks.

While there’s a lot of speculation that ChatGPT will take over certain jobs, right now the best thing jewelers can do is to instruct their employees on how to best use it.

“They’ll be more effective if they have this tool,” Saeks said.

Among possible applications of ChatGPT and other AI: brainstorming business and marketing ideas, creating content, engaging on social media, providing product descriptions, writing emails, translating languages, analyzing data, researching markets, generating leads, drafting business plans, providing legal forms, preparing excel spreadsheets, and doing basic computer programming.

Saeks noted that most internet browsers have AI-powered extensions that can help with specific tasks. The key, he said, is “effective prompting”—ChatGPT works best when it’s “trained.”

“Type like you’re talking to a real person, but an intern,” Saeks said. “Be specific and provide context and dialogue. When you train it, it gets smarter, just like an employee.”

Sometimes it helps to ask ChatGPT to “assume an identity or profession,” he said.

Once, when dealing with a customer’s complaint, Saeks said his instinct was to write an angry email back. Instead, he asked ChatGPT to craft a response, in the guise of a customer service expert. It worked perfectly, he said, with the client replying, “This is why I like dealing with you.”

Jewelers, he said, might ask the chatbot to “act like an experienced copywriter with high levels of expertise and authority within the jewelry industry. [Make its] job writing content for social media, blogs, and LinkedIn articles.”

Retailers may still need to add their own individual touch, Saeks pointed out—otherwise, every jeweler’s blog will be the same. But a lot of the grunt work will be done.

Another possible use: Input the top 10 objections you get when you do sales presentations, and ask it for possible answers.

Saeks added that when using these tools, the key is to keep refining your instructions. So if a result sounds too mechanical, ask the bot to rewrite it in a conversational tone.

For all the ways that people think these tools will change the world, ChatGPT in particular has certain limitations, he said. “Use it in conjunction with human judgment, not as replacement for it,” Saeks said. “Humans bring empathy, adaptability, and creativity. That’s not going away.”

ChatGPT frequently delivers inaccurate or plagiarized information. “You have to check its work,” Saeks said. “Don’t assume its answers are right. It can cause trouble as much as it can help you. Ask it for sources and to justify answers.”

The chatbot also presents privacy and secrecy concerns, and he advised his audience to be careful what they “tell it,” because chances are, that information is being stored somewhere.

(Photo: Getty Images)

In his new role, Schechter will focus on account and partner outreach as well as product strategy development.

Schechter has over two decades of experience in the jewelry industry. He ran tech operations for his family business, Honora, until it was purchased by Richline Group in 2013.

Schechter served as the primary business manager for the Richline’s e-commerce website Gemvara, where he partnered with retailers like Helzberg Diamonds, Macy’s, and Reeds Jewelers.

He has also occasionally written for JCK.

“BOSS Logics connects vendors with their retailers to create better digital opportunities and better data,” Schechter tells JCK. “It builds on what I’ve been doing my whole career, as far as merging jewelry and technology.”

“Michael brings a unique industry point of view, and his deep roots in the jewelry industry mean that he literally grew up with the DNA of the industry around him,” said Zach Lipsky, founder and CEO of BOSS Logics, in a statement.

(Photo courtesy of BOSS Logics)

Most retailers have been taught that beyond their disparate origins, the diamonds are chemically, optically, and physically identical, and that’s the message they’ve conveyed to consumers.

“For years, the trade has repeated these sentiments: that lab and natural diamonds are indistinguishable from each other,” says Lindsay Reinsmith, chief operating officer and director of sales at Ada Diamonds, a lab-grown, direct-to-consumer diamond brand based in San Francisco.

“We’re seeing so many more reductive claims that this is an indistinguishable product and that’s not the case,” adds Jason Payne, Reinsmith’s husband and CEO of Ada Diamonds.

The potential structural and crystal differences between lab-grown and natural diamonds, as well as between lab-growns in general, go well beyond the 4Cs (cut, color, clarity, and carat size), and can often be seen with the naked eye. That was the gist of an hour-long presentation that Reinsmith and Payne gave at GIA headquarters in Carlsbad, Calif., on March 1 as part of the institute’s monthly guest speaker series.

“I look at lab diamonds all day,” Reinsmith tells JCK. “The year 2019 was a big turning point. We started to see a lot more material. We’d ask to inspect stones for our inventory and we started to see a lore more variants beyond the 4Cs in our office. And we started to have conversations with growers.”

Much of what Reinsmith and Payne began seeing were lab diamonds grown via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) that were tinged with brown or gray colors, or featured signs of strain and striation—lending the stones a streaky and blurry appearance, respectively.

In diamonds grown by high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) presses, some of the telltale signs of poor-quality growth that Reinsmith and Payne noted were stones tinged with blue or gray, as well as those that had phosphoresced.

The couple explained these crystal defects as the intentional byproducts of growing processes designed to speed product to market at the expense of quality.

“In the beginning, lab diamond growers sought to create super high-purity crystals that rivaled some of the best natural diamonds,” Reinsmith said during the presentation. “Then, in the last few years, interest exploded. Aspirational players [entered the market], many using disadvantaged technology. A lot had no business growing diamonds.

“The problem was exacerbated during Covid,” she added. “Diamond mining stayed shut longer than diamond growing. Cutters needed rough to cut and this has incentivized a market that encourages producing as much and as fast as possible for the lowest cost possible.”

As growers around the world sought to increase their output, yet lacked the finances to increase their capital investments, they began taking shortcuts, said Reinsmith.

“You accelerate your growth cycle, you use and reuse cheap materials, you introduce masking materials,” she said “Lab-growns got faster and cheaper to produce, but not better.”

Payne made clear that growing problems often start with seeds. “There is no such thing as a perfect seed,” he said. “Seed quality defines diamond quality. The more faults, the blurrier the diamonds.

“Seeds deteriorate with each use,” he added. “So every time you use a seed, and start and stop your CVD reactor, the quality of the seed decays. You recycle them and they get poorer in quality. The challenge for CVD growers is to procure good quality seeds.”

The upshot of these market dynamics is two-fold: One, there’s been a glut of lab-grown material, particularly in the 2 to 3 ct. range. And two: The market is bifurcating into two segments, one populated by upscale producers who take time growing their diamonds and charge a premium as a result, and budget producers who prioritize fast, cheap goods.

Reinsmith and Payne said they expect greater industry consolidation, as poor-quality growers begin going out of business, and, in the worst-case scenario, a consumer confidence crisis that stands to disrupt the entire lab-grown diamond trade.

“We owe it to the public to have more transparency about lab-grown diamonds,” Reinsmith said. “We should cease referring to them as identical, with differences only seen with special tools. If you’re an independent jeweler who recently started selling lab-grown, you likely built your business on reputation. You owe it to your customers to get educated on what the quality characteristics are beyond the 4Cs.

“And don’t lie because the diamonds speak for themselves,” she added.

Top: Four G color lab-grown diamonds produced by CVD technology (photo courtesy of Ada Diamonds)

Buy now, pay later, generally abbreviated to BNPL, is a burgeoning trend in retail payment. Billed as an alternative to cash or credit cards, this form of financing aims to give customers flexibility by letting them pay for purchases over time, without the high interest rates many credit cards charge.

The pitch is proving popular with inflation-strapped consumers. Adobe Analytics reported that from Thanksgiving through the following Cyber Monday, BNPL purchases jumped by a whopping 85% compared with the week prior.

If you’re considering offering BNPL as a payment option, here’s what you need to know.

What is it, anyway?

Today’s pay-later programs are most often compared to the layaway plans common in earlier, pre–credit card generations. The big difference that makes BNPL appealing to a customer base used to instant gratification: While buyers still make a set of fixed installment payments, they get their merchandise before—not after—paying off the entire amount. Often, they won’t incur any interest or fees if they agree to pay off their purchase in a series of payments, usually four payments on a biweekly basis.

Shoppers, especially young shoppers, don’t view BNPL as negative because they perceive it as “free” money, according to marketing experts. “It started as an appeal to Gen Z and younger consumers who have this preconceived notion of credit cards as negative,” says Anastasiya Ghosh, a marketing professor at the University of Arizona.

Retailers who use these platforms agree. “It helps close the sale, which is great,” says Elizabeth Gibson, founder and CEO of Austin, Texas–based Eliza Page, who says her store has been using the BNPL provider Affirm for a few years.

Gibson adds that the sales processed through BNPL seem to be incremental, rather than cannibalizing credit card purchases. “When a customer sees it on your website, it lowers the barrier to entry,” she says. “If they don’t have $5,000 at that moment, they feel like ‘I can afford this.’”

How does it work?

Companies offering BNPL loans are generally fintechs—that is, financial technology companies that perform bank-like functions without actually being banks. Similar to how you might contract with a credit card payment processor—either a traditional bank or a startup like Square (whose corporate parent, Block, acquired BNPL company Afterpay last year)—you can work with one or more BNPL platforms to give customers the option to split up the cost of their spending and pay over time. Your customers see the option to pay with BNPL when they initiate the checkout process.

Another appeal of BNPL versus traditional financing is easy access. For most shoppers, getting approved for a BNPL account is faster than applying for a credit card, since it doesn’t involve an in-depth evaluation—a “hard pull”—of their credit report. Shoppers who already have an account with the BNPL provider can make a purchase as quickly as with a credit card.

The flagship offering of BNPL companies is interest-free financing that is paid off in four equal installments on a biweekly basis. In addition to their basic short-term, no-interest loan offering, a growing number of BNPL providers have begun to also offer customer financing using a model that looks more like a traditional installment loan, with the borrower agreeing to pay a preset amount of principal as well as interest each month.

Although it might seem redundant, some retailers who use BNPL say it’s helpful to offer more than one option because customers generally have preferred platforms on which they’ve created an account, making checkout quick and seamless.

How much does it cost? 

Like credit card processing arrangements, the payment platform takes a percentage of the purchase price. Some may also charge the merchant a nominal per-transaction processing fee or a monthly account fee akin to a bank account maintenance fee if a minimum threshold of spending isn’t met. (One BNPL platform, Sezzle, charges $15 per month if monthly transactions are below $300.)

The percentage charged by the BNPL processor is contingent upon a number of variables: the company’s own policies, how much of your transaction volume the company believes it can reasonably capture, and the type of payment arrangement you want to offer your customers.

Overall, the transaction fees are comparable to those charged by credit card processing networks, with most falling in the 2% to 7% range. They can be higher if you choose to offer customers the opportunity to finance their purchases over a longer term—say, 12 months versus two months.

Are there any caveats?

Because it falls outside the oversight of other types of consumer debt like credit cards and personal loans, the BNPL industry at present operates in a regulatory gray zone. Some observers—including government regulators—have expressed concern about payment platforms that encourage people to take on debt in any form for discretionary purchases.

“BNPL is still accumulating debt,” Ghosh says. “It just feels different because it segregates the payments.”

Ghosh says younger shoppers prefer the BNPL model to credit cards, which can have borrowers making interest payments for years if they only pay the monthly minimum. Instead, the BNPL installment loan schedule is designed so buyers have a fixed end date by which they complete payment for their purchase. If a buyer misses a payment, there can be fees—generally $10 or less—or other financial penalties assessed, or the platform might prohibit any new purchases until the account is brought back into good standing.

Companies providing pay-later loans use sophisticated credit modeling software to manage their exposure to risk. In practice, this means they limit the dollar amount of transactions they will process through their networks—which can be a headache for jewelers selling high-priced items. If you’re considering adding BNPL to your customer payment options, have a conversation with a company representative to ensure that its transaction limits are suitable for your price points.

Another consideration is that, unlike credit cards that can be used online and in-store, BNPL is generally thought of as wholly for e-commerce transactions. That said, retailers can create a workaround if they want to offer BNPL for in-store purchases by routing the transaction through their website or the BNPL provider’s mobile app on the customer’s phone.

What are the benefits?

“I’m personally an online shopper, and I appreciate the flexible payment options,” says Alexis Padis, president of San Francisco–based Padis Jewelry. “It really allows an opportunity to fit unique budgets and cash flows.”

Padis says her site has offered BNPL via Sezzle for about a year, and she plans to add Klarna, another BNPL platform, in the near future. “Any kind of offering where you can break up the payments without any additional interest is really appealing to clients,” she says.

The growing ubiquity of BNPL among big-box stores and mall brands puts a kind of peer pressure on small retailers to follow suit, Ghosh says. “Nowadays, there’s almost an expectation that most large retailers and even smaller ones offer BNPL like they offer credit cards.”

Padis, though, sees a silver lining in providing the same conveniences as larger rivals. “As these fintech companies become more prominent on other websites, if—as an independent retailer—I can offer that same branded experience, it’s a win for everybody.”

A spokeswoman for Afterpay says the platform, which lets users browse retailers from its app, can help independent businesses reach a broader customer base, particularly hard-to-target young adults. “The Gen Z shopper loves to shop small,” she says.

Stores offering BNPL also benefit from being able to outsource the risk and the management of consumer lines of credit. While many jewelers have historically offered their own financing, BNPL makes that process quicker and easier for both stores and customers, according to Monika Krol, owner of Meeka Fine Jewelry in Camp Hill, Pa. “We initially created a layaway system, but it was just a manual process and not very streamlined.”

Krol says she has used Shopify’s BNPL offering, Shop Pay Installments, in the past. She currently uses Bread Financial and is considering adding more BNPL options based on customer responses.

“It’s great from our end,” Krol says. “We accept the order and we ship the piece, and at that point Bread pays us the full amount and they handle the payments from there.”

•  •  •  •  •

Meet the Big Players in BNPL

Affirm

Afterpay

Bread Financial

Klarna

PayPal Pay in 4  

Sezzle  

Shopify Shop Pay Installments

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