"With cashback from Pliant, we ran ads for two days and generated sales."
Florian Bein is the CEO and Co-Founder of bedrop, an e-commerce startup for bee products. In this interview, he explains why Pliant has had a positive impact on his company's cash flow.
Since 2021, bedrop has been a successful e-commerce startup that sells healing bee products like propolis, manuka honey, and royal jelly. This certified organic and bee-friendly company has more than 60,000 customers and is already expecting its 100,000th order in 2023. Co-founders Betül Yönak-Bein and Florian Bein are aiming for annual sales of 8 million euros, and Florian uses his online marketing expertise to achieve this goal.
Flexible payment cycles for cash flow optimization
Scalable payment solution
Challenge: D2C through paid marketing channels
Bedrop generates 85% of its revenue through direct sales to customers. They sell their products through ads on Meta, Google, and TikTok, as well as via marketplaces like Amazon or online pharmacies. In total, customer acquisition through online marketing accounts for more than ¾ of total sales.
“We used to pay all our bills by PayPal or bank transfer. That ate up our cash flow. On the one hand we had to invest in production and had big stock orders, on the other hand we had to spend on advertising to grow.”
Florian Bein, CEO and Co-Founder of bedrop
Solution: Customized payment cycles to optimize cash flow
Since implementing Pliant, Florian Bein has been accepting credit cards for all types of payments.
"We were finally able to switch to credit cards for native ads as well. We no longer pay all the Amazon fees via bank transfer. Likewise, Shopify transaction fees and costs for various apps are paid with Pliant. Wherever we can, we're switching to Pliant credit cards," explains the CEO.
Pliant offers e-commerce merchants customized payment cycles to optimize their cash flow. With the credit card payment option, companies like bedrop can decide whether they prefer to avoid high debit fees and have more cash on hand, or whether they want to benefit from attractive cashback and boost their margins.
“By billing monthly, Pliant doesn't charge us until we've used the ad spend and earned the money back through sales. We would gain about a month of cash flow if we maxed it out. Currently, we have switched to daily billing in order to get the highest cashback. But of course, we could be vary flexibly here as well.”
Florian Bein, CEO and Co-Founder of bedrop
Outcome: Higher margins thanks to cashback
With Pliant’s corporate credit cards, bedrop has found a future-proof payment solution that will allow the e-commerce company to continue to scale.
“We get real cashback with Pliant, which is also very rare. In the last few weeks, we have run free Facebook ads for two days just from the cashback from Pliant and have made money off of it. This is pure profit, that we simply wouldn’t have had if we had continued to pay through PayPal, simply simply wouldn't be there. It's also possible to request a higher limit for a new marketing channel to scale further.”
