Challenge
Founded in the 1990s, Fanatical offers officially licensed digital games from more than 1,800 publishers to more than 4 million users worldwide. When its contract with an existing payment provider came up for renewal in 2025, company leaders took the opportunity to reassess its payments strategy. The team felt it wasn’t getting the conversion uplift they were looking for, and authorisation rates in the US were falling short of expectations—to the point that Fanatical had begun exploring whether setting up a US LLC might be the only way to improve results.
Fanatical needed a provider with broader global reach, more advanced fraud tools, and the technical flexibility to support a growing international business. But switching providers mid-operation carried real risk: any disruption to payment processing meant lost sales and a poor experience for the platform’s global customer base. Fanatical’s engineering team needed a migration partner that could provide hands-on technical support, keep the project on schedule, and minimise downtime during the cutover.
Beyond the initial integration, Fanatical also wanted a payment partner that would remain actively involved post-launch, helping the company continue to improve performance over time.
Solution
Fanatical switched to Stripe in October 2025 and implemented a customised checkout experience with Stripe Checkout. Using the Checkout Sessions API, the team could manage the full checkout lifecycle through a single integration, reducing engineering overhead. Through Checkout, Fanatical gained access to more than 125 local payment methods, including Alipay, Bancontact, EPS, iDEAL | Wero, and PayPal, in addition to digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Through Stripe, Fanatical gives gamers access to Stripe’s Payments Intelligence Suite, an AI-powered set of payment optimisation, fraud prevention, and business intelligence tools. For fraud protection, Fanatical implemented Stripe Radar for Fraud Teams, which offers Stripe’s fraud detection models with custom rules tailored to Fanatical’s products and geographies. To improve payment success rates, the company also implemented Authorization Boost, a bundle of AI-powered acceptance optimisations, which includes Adaptive Acceptance, network tokens, and card account updater.
Fanatical’s team uses Stripe Sigma to build SQL-based dashboards to monitor authorisation rates, decline reasons, and capture success in real time. That visibility enables the team to identify and address issues quickly, rather than waiting on reports from a third party.
Fanatical worked closely with Stripe professional services throughout the migration. Stripe technical specialists provided guidance at every stage, helping Fanatical work through both technical and operational decisions as they arose.
“Stripe felt like an extension of our own team throughout the process. Their technical specialists were hands-on and supportive, giving us real confidence as we moved through what was a significant and business-critical transition,” said Jon Burgess, head of engineering at Fanatical.
Results
Migration completed in 8 weeks, with only 5 minutes of downtime
Fanatical completed its migration in eight weeks. On launch day, Stripe’s team supported the cutover directly, helping execute the deployment with only five minutes of payment downtime, despite the scale and complexity of the transition. Burgess attributes a lot of that outcome to the quality of Stripe documentation and tooling, as well as the hands-on support provided by the Stripe technical team throughout.
Authorisation rates up from day one
The impact on authorisation rates was immediate, with rates increasing by 21%. With Stripe, US authorisation rates now consistently hit around 95%, and overall, Fanatical now sees authorisation rates of up to 98%.
Stable payments, more time to focus on growth
With strong payment performance from day one, Fanatical’s engineering team could focus on improving its platform rather than troubleshooting payment issues.
Today, the partnership continues to evolve. Fanatical is working with Stripe to expand the payment methods and currencies available to its international customers, adding new options when they make financial sense and building out a checkout experience that works for shoppers around the world.
“The migration was a showcase of what strong engineering execution and a supportive payments partner can achieve together,” said Burgess.
Migrating payment providers is never a small undertaking, but Stripe made it straightforward. We were live in eight weeks, and our authorisation rates improved almost immediately. Stripe’s team has stayed closely involved, and that ongoing support has been just as valuable as the migration itself.
