Amart is one of the most well-known furniture retailers in Australia. In Amart, you can find all types of home items such as pillows, sofas, beds, tables, chairs, and many more. Having various types means that the price ranges also vary, and you might wish to purchase one by splitting the full price. That’s when you need a buy-now-pay-later service like Afterpay or Zip Pay.
Let me first answer your question. Does Amart have Afterpay? The answer is No. Instead, they offer a similar option, Zip Pay.
Zip Pay is also a buy-now-pay-later service like Afterpay. But, the way it works is different from Afterpay. In this post, I’ll explain how you can use Zip Pay and how customers of Zip Pay felt about the service. By the end of the post, you will be able to decide whether or not you want to use Zip Pay at Amart.
What is Zip Pay
As I briefly explained, Zip Pay is a payment option that allows you to buy items right away but pay the full price in installment. What’s great about Zip Pay, you don’t pay any interest, but the store that offered the payment options pays a commission to Zip Pay. So, as a customer, you can use a credit-card-like feature without paying any interest. But, there still is a fee. Please read on to find more about the fee.
How to Use Zip Pay
Then, how can you use it? Whether you are using it at Amart or at other stores, the rules are the same.
- Create a Zip Pay account here.
- An approval decision is made in real-time. When approved, you can start using it on the same date.
- Find a shop that supports Zip Pay here. Amart obviously offers the payment option (only for instore purchase).
- That’s it. Starting shopping online or instore.
Repayments
The way you use Zip Pay is straightforward. Now you will wonder the conditions and how you need to repay?
The first thing you should know is that Zip Pay has a $1,000 limit. That means you can buy a $150 pillow and an $800 table (less than $1,000). However, you cannot buy a $300 pillow and $1,000 table, which exceeds $1,000. Easy! And, the $1,000 limit protects you from overspending. As long as you follow this rule and keep repaying without any delay, I don’t think you would face a big problem.
For the repayment cycle, look at the timeline below:
- Today, you bought a $350 table.
- Tomorrow, you buy a $200 chair.
- On the first day of next month, you will receive a statement that shows the payment balance of $550 ($350 table + $200 chair).
- The last day of next month is due. You can pay either in full ($550) or $40 in minimum. The $40 minimum is a fixed amount by Zip Pay. That means whatever your amount is under $1,000, you should be able to pay at least $40 per month.
Although there is no interest, there is a fee of $6 charged every month only when you have any amount in your payable balance. This means when you have no amount to repay, you don’t pay a fee.
If you fail to pay the minimum $40 installment, you will be charged another $5 as a late fee.
Requirements
To apply for a Zip Pay account, you should meet these criteria.
- You should be an Australian citizen or permanent resident.
- You should be at least 18 years old.
- You should have a valid Facebook or a Paypal account in your name.
- You should have a valid debit card in your name.
- You should not have any history of bankruptcy or insolvency history.
Zip Pay at Amart
There is no difference in how you use Zip Pay for Amart. The same rules apply. But, please note that you cannot use this payment option online. Amart provides the Zip Pay option only instore.
Zip Pay Customer Review Analysis
When you consider buying a product or using a service, you will wonder what experiences other buyers had. Investigating the reviews of other users can lead to a better decision, and it is a wise thing to do as a consumer. If people are dissatisfied with it, they will complain about it and won’t recommend it. If they are happy, they will leave positive comments and share their great experiences. If we can compile and analyze those reviews, we can have an assurance about the product or the service.
That’s what I am going to do for you. I used around 800 reviews that people left on TrustPilot. I summarized those data to generate easy-to-understand graphs and charts. Those visuals will allow you to understand the overall sentiments the customers had toward Zip Pay. They are also easy to understand.
Positive Afterpay Word Cloud
In a word cloud, some words will appear bigger because those specific words were more frequently used among customers. So, the bigger the more frequent, thus, if those big words are positive, it proves that most of the customers had a positive experience. Have a look at the word cloud of Zip Pay.
The word cloud above should have given you a good impression of their products. The most frequent word that actual customers used in their reviews was “easy”. Other big words are also positive – “great”, “good”, “quick”, “happy”, “love”, and many more. Just by looking at the word cloud, we can learn that most of the people were satisfied with the pay-later service.
Among the words, I believe that “easy” is a meaningful word that’s used to describe the service. Many people felt that it was easy to use Zip Pay. This is what we exactly want to experience.
Customer Sentiments
The word cloud tells you what descriptive words people used for the product. There is another angle we can use to understand the Zip Pay customer reviews. That is by categorizing the reviews into a type of 10 sentiments. While I used the review titles for the word cloud above, I used the review contents for the sentiment analysis. The result is the graph below.
I was able to run my sentiment analysis code to find out what specific sentiments people had over Zip Pay. As we could guess from the word cloud, more than half of the review contents were positive. Of course, people shared negative experiences. I haven’t seen any review that is all positive. Despite the negative reviews, overall, people left positive comments on the payment service.
Zip Pay Interest Trend
Another type of analysis I often use for a product review is using Google Trend. It is an extremely helpful service by Google that gives you a historical Google search trend. The idea is that if a product or a company can maintain or can increase its search volume over many years, it supports the quality of the product. If a product is bad, people won’t show their interest and eventually will never search for the product anymore. Then, how is the trend of Zip Pay? Plus, how has people’s interest in general been changed?
Please note that the Google Trends data for this post included the search traffic from Australia only.
The search trend line looks encouraging. Since mid-2016, the level of people’s search on Google has been on the rise steadily. This proves the growing amount of people’s interest in Zip Pay. Given the trend in the past, we could see even more increases in the search volume in the future.
Conclusion
Amart has a diverse range of home products. Using Zip Pay, you can now more easily access their products. From my customer review analysis and Google trends, we learned that many people loved using it especially thanks to the easiness. If you are considering trying Zip Pay, I believe it can be a good idea if you can use it properly. I meant don’t overuse it beyond what you can afford.
Useful Links
I included some useful links to YouTube videos that can help your understanding and provide more tips about Zip Pay.
- Zip Pay Review – How does it compare to Afterpay?
- Is buying now and paying later too good to be true? | ABC News
If you want to check my other posts about Afterpay, check these:
