B2B BNPL as Channel Strategy: Effects on Distributor Marketing Effort, Working Capital, and Collaborative Performance

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-914-8_10How to use a DOI?

Keywords

B2B BNPL; Working Capital; Marketing Effort; Collaborative Performance; Trade Credit; Channel Strategy

Abstract

This study reframes B2B Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) as a channel strategy and tests whether embedded credit at order placement improves working capital, increases distributor marketing effort, and enhances collaborative performance through an effort-based mechanism. Using a multi-year manufacturer–distributor–month panel assembled from secondary sources (fintech BNPL logs, manufacturer ERP/TPM, distributor ERP), we estimate simple fixed-effects regressions with distributor and month dummies and clustered standard errors. Outcomes include the cash conversion cycle (CCC) and its components (DPO/DSO/DIO), a marketing-effort index combining co-op budget utilization, promotion executions, and salesforce calls, and a composite performance index covering sell-through, on-time/in-full, and new-product-introduction coverage. Assumption checks rely on descriptive pre-trend plots, an event-study around adoption timing, nearest-neighbor matching, and a product-of-coefficients mediation with cluster bootstraps. BNPL adoption reduces CCC by about 6.2 days—driven mainly by higher DPO—and raises marketing effort by roughly 0.18 standard deviations; lagged effort predicts a 0.22-SD improvement in collaborative performance. The indirect effect from BNPL to performance via effort is positive and statistically precise (≈0.040 SD), with effects persisting beyond twelve months and concentrating among financially constrained distributors and in fast-clock-speed categories. The results suggest BNPL should be treated as a design lever at the CMO–CFO–CSCO interface, linking fee subsidies and limits to execution KPIs, targeting constrained partners and short-lifecycle categories, and monitoring joint dashboards that integrate finance and execution metrics. Overall, embedded B2B BNPL appears to create value not only by shifting cash flows but by enabling downstream effort that improves dyadic outcomes.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - G. Prasanna Kumar
AU  - B. Rajesh Kumar
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/24
TI  - B2B BNPL as Channel Strategy: Effects on Distributor Marketing Effort, Working Capital, and Collaborative Performance
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Operations & Supply Chain Management 2025 (ICOSCM 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 120
EP  - 142
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-914-8_10
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-914-8_10
ID  - Kumar2025
ER  -