French 'try-before-you-buy' startup Elyn has raised €2.5 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Headline and Sequoia Arc.
Elyn is geared towards online shopping, offering consumers a try-before-you-buy option at the checkout. Users tap in their card account details and are charged five days after delivery.
If the item is not appropriate, the user can block the transaction and Elyn will handle the returns/refunds for the retailer.
“With try-before-you-buy, you only pay for what you decide to keep,” Elyn co-founder and CEO El Mehdi Hachad told TechCrunch. “We are also helping retailers with their returns so that return requests are turned into exchanges directly in the return interface that we provide.”
The company has struck a deal with Shopify to roll out the product to its small merchant customers. The startup uses pre-authorisation requests to verify the validity of Visa, Mastercard and CB cards and charges transaction fees based on successful sales net of returns.