Challenge

SkipTheDishes embarked on an initiative to modernize its technology stack with the goal of building a best-in-class, customer-first experience for its food delivery offering. It chose to partner with Stripe to provide customers with a smooth checkout experience, all while reducing fraud and eliminating downtime.

“Our old payments platform was clunky, heavy, and frustrating to work with,” recalled Rob Stewart, director of engineering at SkipTheDishes. "Stripe was a nice fit that also gave us the capabilities, payments knowledge, and technical support to keep our products well ahead of our growth trajectory and customer and courier expectations.”

As rapid growth in the food delivery market in recent years increased demand and attracted more competitors, SkipTheDishes sought to differentiate itself by further enhancing the customer and courier experiences. Massive growth across the industry also made fraud and regulatory compliance more prevalent, and the company knew it needed to enable innovative practices for payment optimization, compliance, and fraud management, providing the foundation for even more product innovation in the future.

Solution

In the beginning of the partnership, SkipTheDishes implemented Stripe Payments to deliver a fast, reliable payment experience and a frictionless checkout for its customers. The integration was completed in just three months to meet SkipTheDishes’ ambitious launch timeline. Following the Stripe Payments implementation, SkipTheDishes has expanded its usage of Stripe’s suite of payments products to optimize payment authorization rates, reduce fraud, and maintain compliance, including:

• Payment optimization features, such as Adaptive Acceptance and card account updater, which give SkipTheDishes customers a smooth payments experience by reducing card declines.
  
• Built-in PCI compliance, which significantly simplifies the PCI burden for SkipTheDishes by handling all payment card data and sensitive information directly on Stripe servers.
  
• Stripe Radar, which uses machine learning to continuously adapt to shifting fraud patterns tailored to SkipTheDishes’ unique business.
  
• Support for 3D Secure 2, which further helps SkipTheDishes reduce fraud while adding frictionless payments authentication for an improved customer experience.
  

“We pride ourselves in providing the best experience for our customers,” said Jeff Arsenio, head of product development at SkipTheDishes. “Any form of checkout friction we can alleviate while also being able to effectively manage risk is the balancing act we choose to take, and Stripe helps us achieve both.”

SkipTheDishes also used Stripe Connect and Instant Payouts to build Fast Cash, which lets couriers get paid in as little as 30 minutes. As the pandemic wore on, this pioneering offering delivered faster access to cash for couriers. It’s a competitive differentiator for SkipTheDishes and integrated easily into the company’s existing payments infrastructure.

“Stripe’s ability to integrate seamlessly into our system enabled an incredibly smooth launch of Fast Cash, which is a complex feature that spanned multiple working groups across the organization,” said Tyson McCann, head of product at SkipTheDishes.

Results

Stripe has become SkipTheDishes’ payments foundation, helping support aggressive growth while enabling faster launch of new offerings—all of which help SkipTheDishes stay ahead of competitors in the fast-growing meal delivery market.

Six percent increase in authorization rates

In just three months, SkipTheDishes moved all of its payments volume to Stripe Payments. Features like Adaptive Acceptance and card account updater increased value by optimizing acceptance rates and ensuring a friction-free customer checkout experience.

“Since moving over to Stripe, our payment processing approval rates have picked up by 6% in a very, very short period of time, which is a huge win on improving our conversion rates with customers and our reputation with issuers,” said Arsenio.

More than 45% reduction in chargeback costs

Stripe Radar helps distinguish fraudsters from legitimate customers and enables SkipTheDishes to apply Dynamic 3D Secure to high-risk payments, which can reduce fraud without compromising the user experience. Since switching to Stripe, SkipTheDishes has reduced chargeback costs by over 45%.

“Radar brings in a new level of controls for preventing fraud,” said Stewart. “Stripe really helped guide us in how to use Radar, and it’s nice to have that kind of support.”

Thousands of happy couriers onboarded to Fast Cash

Fast Cash attracted thousands of couriers following its launch and has been pivotal to enhancing SkipTheDishes’ courier experience. Courier retention increased by 10% for the cohort that adopted the new offering, and Fast Cash was tied to a feature that helped increase SkipTheDishes’ app store rating by 20%.

“We were able to quickly use Stripe’s Instant Payout feature because Stripe was already our payments platform,” said McCann. “All of our international markets are now asking for this feature.”