Challenge

By providing products and services that enable businesses to engage, convert, and retain customers online, Shopcada helps several prominent brands build commercially successful e-commerce businesses. But Shopcada’s own revenue was limited to payments for services rendered and subscription income. The business planned to identify new monetisation opportunities, including transactions made via the client e-commerce websites it was hosting.

“These websites record a gross merchandise value exceeding $100 million per year, and obtaining a cut of each transaction made would be an effective way of monetising the traffic we help attract,” says Ethan Cheong, managing director and co-founder of Shopcada.

The business also wanted to broaden the scope of its products and services to businesses, specifically by reducing online and offline channel reconciliation. According to Cheong, consolidating data from order information systems and payment gateway reports was a challenge for many businesses.

Solution

Shopcada aims to continuously improve its omnichannel products and services with the addition of client-driven features. Its leadership team also discussed how to further generate value from its offerings. Deploying Stripe Connect helped Shopcada integrate payments into its client offering. “I liked the flexibility and functionality we could access through Stripe APIs, and the stability and availability of its platform,” says Cheong.

The business then introduced a range of other Stripe products:

• Terminal to enable clients to improve reconciliation for offline sales and streamline their omnichannel strategies
  
• Billing to collect SaaS subscription fees from customers
  
• Radar to mitigate card fraud risk
  
• Payments to accept payments through a range of payment methods
  

Shopcada also used Stripe Professional Services to expedite the implementation with dedicated technical support. “Stripe Professional Services helped us in a number of ways,” says Cheong. “First, the team worked with us to quickly build our domain knowledge around payments, including fraud, risk, refunds, and chargebacks. Second, they accelerated development processes by helping us understand the flow of Stripe Connect, reducing trial and error. And finally, they helped us validate our integrations to ensure they were correct.”

Results

Increasing revenue year-over-year

About a quarter of Shopcada’s clients use the integrated payments facilitated by Stripe Connect less than a year after deployment. The business plans to onboard as many of its remaining clients as possible.

Shopcada expects Stripe Connect to increase its revenue by 10% year-over-year, and the business now has the technology and data to execute plans to better monetise its products and services. The company is now promoting its own payment methods as part of its marketing package as a one-stop e-commerce solution for businesses.

Reconciling online and offline performance to deliver business efficiencies

With Stripe, Shopcada provides transaction reports spanning orders and payments across online and offline channels, enabling businesses to map and accurately reconcile omnichannel performance. “Not having to aggregate data from multiple platforms is the biggest saving for businesses,” says Clara Goh, head of operations and cofounder of Shopcada. “They can check stock levels across multiple channels and distribute and replenish more effectively.”

Meanwhile, Stripe Terminal is reducing manual checkout processes at physical retail stores by eliminating the need to key in payment amounts on card terminals, and by allowing cashiers to cancel card payments without requesting the card back from the customer.

Reducing incident resolution and disputed charges

Using Stripe has also enabled Shopcada to reduce the time and resources needed to resolve incidents by about 20 working hours per quarter – a sizable saving for a growing business.

With data from Stripe, Shopcada is obtaining insights into payments, including the number of disputed and rejected charges. “This enables us to identify what we can do to improve, including taking proactive steps to prevent a charge being disputed later,” says Cheong. “Before we started using Stripe, we never talked about these issues.”