Challenge

Based in Lisarow, New South Wales, Scholastic Australia sponsors programs and events to encourage reading, including 7,000 annual book fairs at schools throughout the country. Its business is highly seasonal: the company earns 40% of revenue during Book Week in August and 20% during National Family Reading Month in May. That seasonality makes it difficult to manage payment technology for in-person transactions. While Scholastic’s larger book fairs use handheld card readers rented from banks, the machines can be expensive to rent, inconvenient to store between peak sales periods, and time-consuming to maintain.

At smaller Scholastic fairs, school staff and volunteer booksellers previously used manual credit card machines that imprinted card data onto a receipt. After card security upgrades, those devices became obsolete, leaving parents and students with a single option for buying books in person: cash. However, cash-only sales meant more friction for buyers—especially those accustomed to paying for everything with cards or digital wallets—and lower potential revenues for Scholastic Australia.

“We are getting close to a cashless society,” said Greg Hayne, digital services manager at Scholastic Australia. “If you’re only offering cash as a payment mechanism, you’ve got a real problem.”

Reconciliation also proved troublesome. Aggregating the income from book sales and funneling it into Scholastic’s bank accounts—while accurately tracking the details of cash and online sales as well as card reader transactions from the larger book fairs—was taking too much time and diverting resources from growing the business.

In early 2024, the Scholastic team set out to find a payment solution that could support fast and secure payments for book fairs of any size and location—one that worked well for a seasonal business. They needed technology that volunteers and school staff could adopt quickly and that a small team of developers could implement easily.

Solution

Scholastic found the ideal partner in Stripe using Tap to Pay on iPhone, a contactless payment acceptance solution that is easy to integrate using the Stripe Terminal SDK.

Tap to Pay on iPhone fulfilled Scholastic’s core requirements: booksellers at fairs would be able to accept all types of in-person, contactless payments—from physical debit and credit cards to Apple Pay and other digital wallets—right on their iPhones, without extra hardware. Tap to Pay on iPhone uses the iPhone’s built-in features to help keep business and customer data private and secure.

With Stripe Terminal, data from all in-person payments flows into one system, allowing for simplified reconciliation and reporting.

Scholastic’s developers relied on Stripe’s clear, comprehensive documentation to implement Tap to Pay on iPhone, building a custom app tailored to the specific needs of sellers at book fairs. “Stripe Terminal gave us the flexibility to build our own user interface and design our own integration,” said Earvin Pepito, lead developer on the project.

Before the Scholastic team launched Tap to Pay on iPhone in August 2024, they conducted a trial rollout at a few book fairs, where parent volunteers and school staff learned that accepting payment with Tap to Pay on iPhone takes just a few simple steps. To make sure first-time users of Tap to Pay on iPhone understood the Scholastic app’s flow, the team developed a series of training videos showing how to hold cards in the optimal position, retry unsuccessful transactions, and send email receipts with a single click.

Results

Over 207% revenue growth underscores popularity of Tap to Pay on iPhone

Scholastic Australia’s annual revenue from Tap to Pay on iPhone sales grew approximately 207% YOY from 2024 to 2025. Smaller fairs that previously relied on cash transactions have seen healthy increases, with some generating all sales through Tap to Pay on iPhone.

Adoption of Tap to Pay on iPhone grows steadily as awareness spreads

To promote the continuing rollout, Scholastic provides links to videos and other support resources for every book fair. These resources, along with overwhelmingly positive feedback from fairs that used Tap to Pay on iPhone in 2024 (mostly located in smaller towns), helped propel greater adoption in 2025—to 16% of Scholastic book fairs across Australia.

Hayne expects that figure to double in 2026. “I think the large fairs are also going to adopt Tap to Pay on iPhone as they see the benefits that it brings,” he said.

Scholastic enjoys faster bank deposits and better visibility into its finances

For Scholastic’s tech and finance teams, the centralised reconciliation and reporting provided through Terminal represents a significant step forward from its previous, largely manual approach.

“The information is automatically collated into our internal portal and the money comes straight into our bank account,” said Hayne. “The fair organisers know what they’ve sold, and we know exactly what’s going on.”

Tap to Pay on iPhone’s ease of use makes it ideal for seasonal sellers

The volunteers running Scholastic book fairs appreciate that Tap to Pay on iPhone lets them accept contactless payments on their iPhones with just a few steps. “Even the least tech-savvy people in the trial rollout adopted it quite easily, with no issues,” said Hayne.

Scholastic credits Stripe and Apple for a smooth implementation of Tap to Pay on iPhone

Implementation was quick and easy, according to Hayne. “We didn’t face any hurdles at all,” he said. “I’d say the same for the Apple app submission process—it was very straightforward.”