Recently, you may have seen an Afterpay button appear underneath your favorite products. It may look something like what you see above.

If you are a member of a generation that can remember the last century with any kind of accuracy, this inducement may seem kind of puzzling. The concept of breaking a payment down into easy, bite sized pieces just doesn’t sound like a thing to people who are from generations with more, shall we say, stature. 

But, it’s not really for us!

Afterpay is a new way of paying that breaks down the cost of items into four more manageable payments without interest. This type of payment is mediated (as all things are nowadays) through a phone app, but can also be managed online.

This is not a credit card or some kind of loan with fees. The product really is what it says on the box: make one of four payments now, and another three over the course of six weeks. Retailers, such as Skin Actives Scientific, pay a portion of each sale directly to Afterpay, thereby alleviating the interest payment from our customers.

Why Would Someone Want to Do This?

Well, the news has been telling us for years now that Millennials and Gen-Z are really feeling the economic squeeze. And wherever you stand politically, statistically it’s shown that the latest generations just don’t have access to the same kind of wealth that our generations did at the same point.

So a lot of younger people are turning to apps like Afterpay to expand their purchasing power today. It’s just a new choice for a new generation, designed to meet their needs. And while Afterpay is certainly a huge carrier of this type of payment option, they aren’t the only ones out there. You’ll find Afterpay, or other groups in the same space, at a wide array of retail stores.

So if Afterpay brought you to Skin Actives, welcome! If you are looking at the icons and feeling concerned about what they mean, don’t be!