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

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.