Challenge

Launched in Los Angeles in 2017, Mangomint offers salons and spas a single centralized platform to book appointments, accept payments, communicate with customers, and manage operations. Initially, Mangomint relied on a referral partnership to process transactions for its users, pointing them to an external payment flow controlled by a third party. That partnership made payment processing easy to implement, but it also gave Mangomint little control over the user experience and pricing structure, and little access to customer account information.

That was a problem. Mangomint differentiates itself from other salon and spa management software with its high level of customization that allows the platform to blend seamlessly into both a salon’s operations and its consumer-facing interactions. The lack of control made it more difficult for Mangomint to offer that premium experience. The rigid pricing structure also didn’t become more favorable as the company scaled up. And the lack of access to real-time technical information limited Mangomint’s ability to help customers troubleshoot. “Users inevitably look to the software provider when they have technical questions,” said Daniel Lang, cofounder and CEO of Mangomint. “But if you don’t have visibility into what’s going on, you may not have the answers for them. And that’s a frustrating experience for the user.”

Mangomint partnered with a second provider to integrate payments more deeply into its platform, but a lack of high-quality documentation or sophisticated APIs prevented the company from customizing the payment solution to suit its needs. Merchant onboarding took longer than desired, some reporting data wouldn’t end up in the correct software flow, and the payment hardware was excessively difficult to debug. “It just didn’t have the engineering rigor to do the job,” said Lang. In 2021, Mangomint decided it needed a new provider that offered developer-friendly technology and would let Mangomint customize the implementation.

The new payment solution would also need to accommodate the mix of employees and self-employed service providers common in the beauty and wellness industry. For example, a hair salon with 20 chairs may staff 10 of them with employees and rent the other 10 to independent stylists. That can get complicated, with each independent stylist requiring an individual merchant account linked to an individual card reader. And it can bring friction to the customer experience, if customers have to change how they pay depending on who styles their hair. Mangomint was looking for a payment provider that could help it solve those challenges.

Mangomint needed a provider with a point-of-sale solution that makes it convenient for end customers to pay by whichever channel they prefer, whether mobile, online, or in-person.

But, above all, the POS solution had to have a high uptime. “When a merchant calls you with a payment processing issue, usually their customer is standing there waiting for their payment to be accepted. At that moment, reliability really matters,” said Lang.

Fast, intuitive onboarding was another must-have. “We’re a product-led growth company, so most of the time our merchants onboard without having spoken with us,” said Lang. “It’s incredibly important that the onboarding experience be really polished and simple. The more merchants can onboard successfully on their own, the less time our support team needs to spend guiding them through it.”

Solution

Mangomint chose to partner with Stripe because of its reputation as a developer-friendly tech partner. “We looked at others, but Stripe was the one we knew we wanted,” said Lang. “It was never really a question. The quality of Stripe’s documentation, the quality of the APIs—our engineering team loved it.”

Mangomint adopted Stripe Payments to process online transactions and Stripe Terminal to process in-person transactions with the compact Stripe Reader M2, relying on Stripe’s powerful APIs and thorough documentation to embed a customized payments flow. Terminal allowed salons and spas using Mangomint to manage online and in-person payments in one place, for a unified view of payments across channels. Using the Payment Element, an embeddable, conversion-optimized UI component from Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, Mangomint developed a self-checkout feature that makes it easy for the service provider to trigger a text message sent to the client’s phone. A link in the message takes clients to a Mangomint-hosted screen where they can use the Payment Element to pay with the payment information they gave when they set up the appointment. “In a lot of cases, you don’t need to have one of your staff sitting idly at the front desk waiting to take a payment. And for the end customer, it’s a much more streamlined experience,” said Lang.

Stripe Connect gave Mangomint the ability to move money among multiple parties. Connect’s onboarding process, with a simple user interface, instant verification of tax information, and prompt verification of uploaded documents, made it easy and quick for the salon and each independent service provider to set up their own payment account. That made it possible for Mangomint to route certain payments to the salon and other payments directly to independent service providers, without impacting the merchant or end customer experience.

Results

Custom implementation takes only three months

Stripe’s well-designed APIs and thorough documentation gave Mangomint the ability to execute a highly customized integration and to do it quickly. “The entire switch to Stripe only took three months. That’s very fast when you consider how mission-critical the implementation was and how many different forms of payment we had to accept.”

Self-checkout saves salons hours every week

Mangomint’s self-checkout feature saves salons and spas an average of three minutes per payment, which adds up to several hours per week. Furthermore, it can eliminate the need for a dedicated front-desk worker by allowing service providers to process transactions themselves.

Simplified payments onboarding reduces total onboarding time by 64%

Previously, it would take salons and spas around 14 days to be up and running with Mangomint. Because of Connect’s efficient, intuitive onboarding process, it now takes less than five days.