The French startup Elyn invents the staggered payment

After the split payment, Elyn, a French start-up, proposes a new solution to allow a customer to place an order and to be charged the amount of the purchase in a staggered way. The goal is to allow them to try before they buy. To do this, Elyn will act on two invoices: improving the management of returns for the e-retailer and adding additional flexibility options for the customer, in the choice of products and in the payment.

FACTS

• The French start-up, born in 2022, has come up with a new concept fresh from the United States: combining Try before you buy with the possibility of exchanging an item upon return, instead of having to make two transactions (a return for the wrong size item, for example, and a new order to get it in another size).

• To accelerate, Elyn raised €2.5 million from Headline and Arc, Sequoia Capital's Seed and Pre-Seed program, with the participation of business angels such as Motier Ventures (Family Office of the owners of Galeries Lafayette), Michaël Benabou (Veepee & Financière Saint James) or Marc Ménasé (Founders Future).

• The company offers a returns management platform, which allows e-retailers to offer their customers different return methods and instant product exchanges.

• The customer will have 5 days to try and 3 days to return the order, so that the return to stock is done as quickly as possible for the merchant.

• In one year, the start-up has conquered about twenty e-retailers, such as The Bradery, Noliju, Flair, Paul & Joe, Maison Labiche, Bott...

• It has surrounded itself with technical specialists who have proven themselves in other French start-ups: Alan, Pennylane, Spendesk.

CHALLENGES

• Democratize the "try before you buy" : today, this feature is only known by Zalando and Amazon Prime customers, the two e-retailers to offer this option, which requires from the retailer a very efficient and often expensive returns management. Elyn's idea is to democratize this solution, which offers significant added value for the end customer, by drastically simplifying the process for the merchant.

• A global solution to address the pain point of online fitting : What sets Elyn apart is the fact that it has built a holistic solution from the start, unlike the payment giants who have only very recently chosen to acquire returns management solutions.

  • In e-commerce, conversion rates are 10 times lower than in stores (70% of shopping carts are abandoned).

  • According to IFOP, 68% of French people have already returned their purchases online, which places France on the podium of European countries with the highest return rate.

  • 20% of customers try on items before buying them with Elyn.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• The BNPL market continues to grow strongly. It is estimated that the market will be worth nearly €25 billion in France by 2025, up from €6 billion in 2019, according to figures from Xerfi.

• To exist on this market, companies are standing out by offering white-label BNPL to allow banks to take over their role as financial intermediaries. Others have committed to a more inclusive and responsible version of BNPL, called SNBL (Save Now Buy Later), like the Indian startup Multipl.

• The issue of returns is also, along with the subject of the last mile, one of the thorny points to make the e-commerce journey perfectly smooth. One of the first players to address the issue was online payment giant PayPal, which acquired the startup Happy Returns in 2021, whose service allows online purchases to be returned to physical stores. The concept of Happy Returns was to re-humanize returns by relying on a network of drop-off points where buyers can directly return their products for a refund or exchange.