I am rather surprised that so many users here--who are presumably some of the smarter people out there--supposed that from this email that B&H had found some sort of "loophole" or "workaround," twisting themselves into pretzels thinking about it, rather than simply assuming as a default that it was some sort of discounting promotion gimmick. That was the only thing that came to my mind from square one as soon as I read it.
Because the marketing around Playboo as being a "new business to solve the tax problem" doesn't necessarily seem to trigger - hey I'm going to give you a discount if you pay via our preferred financier. The initial email announcement around this just seemed to make it feel like some kind of shell game.
IMO, Now that details are out, the way it is positioned, standing up a whole other line of business/partnership for the sole purpose of providing a credit line in addition to what amounts to a < 10% discount for most purchases seems rather odd. It makes be wonder why they needed to do this since I thought they already had existing in-house financing options. My only guess is Synchrony is offering them a major incentive (more than the roughly 10% sales tax on each order) to change their internal financing option.
Unless a vast number of orders are currently financed, I don't know how Synchrony makes money on this partnership unless there's a disproportionate amount of folks that don't pay off their purchase via this Payboo immediately and incur interest charges - which would reduce the "sales-tax savings" as a reward. If there's already a lot of "financed purchases" - that "sales-tax savings" is just part of the introductory rate on a purchase via Synchrony and just translates into even more shared revenue between B&H and Synchrony.
