OrderAhead: Getting Ahead with Stripe

Whether you are taking a lunch break, grabbing dinner with your family, or picking up a picnic for your friends, long wait times and lines at your restaurant of choice can keep your stomach growling and waste valuable time away from your family, friends, or office. How to get that time back? OrderAhead lets you order and pay directly from your mobile phone for takeout from over 500 different restaurants. After placing your order and paying via OrderAhead’s mobile app, you can quickly grab your food at the restaurant when it’s ready, and avoid the wait. OrderAhead shows a plethora of restaurant choices and a simple one-click online shopping experience, while providing merchants and shop owners with an easy way to get their stores and inventory online, driving visibility for their business and a steady stream of foot traffic.

Built for Mobile

With mobile usage blossoming, OrderAhead needed a reliable payment service that could seamlessly support both mobile and online services and that could scale with their growing business. After looking at Authorize.net, and other payments providers, cofounders Henry Lee, James Butts and Jeffrey Byun chose Stripe, because it is built for mobile from the ground up. “We heard great things about Stripe from both the YCombinator community and others. When I first started using it, it was very fast, user-friendly and had great documentation,” said Lee. “Stripe is much more REST-based. The documentation is all on one page and very searchable. There are so many differences compared to Authorize.net. It was night and day in comparison. It’s the difference between modern and antiquated technologies.”

Seamless Checkout

OrderAhead is able to provide customers on the go with a seamless check out experience with Stripe. Their customers can store credit card information within the OrderAhead mobile app, making it easy to quickly purchase within just a few taps. Customers can also add multiple credit cards to their OrderAhead account to help simplify personal and business purchases.

Access to Critical Data

Being able to easily search and find payments, and download and export data is critical to providing great customer experience. “We’ve customized Stripe on our backend so that with one-click in our own admin panel, we can make a full refund to a user. We can also easily do partial refunds at our discretion and automatically send the user a revised receipt via email thanks to Stripe’s webhooks.” explained Lee.

OrderAhead’s experience with Stripe has been enjoyable every step of the way. Everything from the quick implementation process to the design has exceeded the team’s expectations. Stripe’s API makes it so easy that OrderAhead rarely has to make changes to its payments code and can focus on creating the best mobile ordering experience possible.

One of the best parts of using Stripe is that it can be easily customized to meet the changing needs of a growing business. With hundreds of merchants across the country already on board, OrderAhead hopes to become a one-stop shop for picking up anything, anywhere.

For more information, visit OrderAhead.

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