Swedish bank Nordax has created a tool to urge people to buy less online – and to make smoothies instead.
How we shop online is constantly evolving, with new ways to pay and get items delivered. Now, with a global pandemic keeping everyone bored at home, online shopping has reached new heights.
Nordax Bank, a Swedish niche bank that offers loans for people who don’t have traditional employment status, is seeing the downside of the new possibilities with online shopping.
With more and more credit companies offering the possibility to split payments on any kind of purchase, a lot of Swedes find themselves in a hard to get out of debt.
The Swedish Enforcement Authority, the government agency that handles debts, showed in a recent statement that the majority of people in Sweden under 30 years old with debt with the Enforcement Authority have gained the debt from online shopping with split payments. And that’s where Nordax’s new plugin comes into play.
“Many of our customers are people who have gained too many loans and credits and need to gather these into one loan. Being able to buy whatever you want in whatever way you want online is pretty fun, but we wanted to find a way to help people to do it with some reflection – do I really need this stuff or am I just bored? So we created a plugin that encourages you to make a smoothie before you press buy. Basically it’s a pretty simple way to shop smarter,” said Hanna Belander, CMO at Nordax Bank.
The tool is a Google Chrome plugin called Smoothie Shopping that pops up at check out, urging you to take a moment and instead make a smoothie, a little break to contemplate if you really want to press ‘buy’.
“The possibilities we have when it comes to online shopping is great, but for a lot of people it puts them in a very tricky financial situation that is sometimes hard to get out of. With our smoothie shopping plugin we hope we can give people an actual tool to shop smarter, but also ignite a conversation about the debt situation that has hit Swedish households,” said Belander.
