Challenge

Japan’s food service industry has been slow to adopt digital transformation, with restaurants relying on analog systems for daily operations. While ecommerce businesses use data analytics for growth, most Japanese restaurants conduct business without visibility into customer purchasing patterns or preferences. This disconnect between customer data and purchase history prevents restaurant owners from making informed business decisions that could improve their operations.

favy set out to solve this problem by developing a vertical SaaS platform centered around its innovative online-merge-offline (OMO) strategy, which integrates the digital and physical aspects of restaurant operations. The company rapidly expanded the platform’s capabilities, successively launching tools such as a subscription management system for restaurants, an OMO visitor tracking system to connect online browsing with in-restaurant visits, and return on ad spend (ROAS) analytics to measure marketing effectiveness across both digital and physical touchpoints.

From the early stages of service development, favy recognized that building payments infrastructure would be a major challenge. For its platform to function properly, it needed to systematize complex payment flows, including collecting food and beverage charges from customers, receiving subscription service payments, and setting system usage fees from restaurants. With a small development team and pressure to reach the market quickly, favy faced a difficult choice. Building a comprehensive system that could support its OMO vision would require significant engineering time and pull resources away from developing core restaurant management features.

Solution

From the early stages of developing its subscription service, favy decided to implement Stripe Connect, which provides a comprehensive suite of payment functions for platforms. Connect directly solved favy’s need to manage the fund flows between diners, restaurants, and its own subscription service without building custom infrastructure. While Connect successfully automated the complex fund flows and compliance needs of a vertical SaaS, the deciding factor for favy was its “overwhelmingly developer-friendly” design philosophy.

To accelerate development and preserve engineering resources for core features, favy used Stripe’s comprehensive developer tools. “Stripe’s testing environment and extensive documentation enabled our developers to implement autonomously, without spending time on support inquiries,” said Yuji Mori, CPO of the marketing division at favy. “Development progressed, by feel, 10 times faster compared to other payment services we evaluated.”

This speed advantage directly addressed favy’s urgency to reach the market quickly with its innovative restaurant management platform.

For its subscription billing needs, favy implemented Stripe Billing, which automated recurring payments and provided the flexibility needed for different restaurant sizes and service tiers. This eliminated the need to build custom subscription logic that would have further stretched favy’s development resources.

As a startup with limited resources, favy made a strategic business decision based on the comprehensive solution Stripe offered. “The benefit of paying processing fees to reduce engineer development costs and launch our service into the market faster was far greater than building everything ourselves,” said Mori.

This decision allowed favy to focus on developing its differentiating features—connecting online customer interactions with offline restaurant experiences—rather than spending months building financial infrastructure.

Results

Launched a subscription system in three months

With Connect, favy avoided building complex financial infrastructure from scratch, achieving a major optimization of development resources. The subscription system, for example, was designed and developed in roughly three months. This speed allowed the engineering team to fully pivot their focus to strengthening core vertical SaaS features.

Redirected resources to core product innovation

This strategic resource shift accelerated the development of high-quality, industry-leading innovations—ranging from improved customer experiences via mobile ordering to “ROAS analytics” that drive restaurant decision-making. By offloading payments infrastructure, favy has shortened product iteration cycles, enabling swift responses to market demands and securing a strong competitive advantage.