Challenge

After more than a decade working in live event merchandising, Yaarz’s founders saw how difficult it was for record labels, production companies, and artists to manage sales across a tour. Inventory and sales data were often tracked manually, making it time-consuming to reconcile transactions, pay out artists, and plan inventory, especially across multishow tours.

“You had no visibility into what merchandise sold most in what city,” said Yohan Imakhoukhene, founder and chief executive officer at Paris-based Yaarz. “You’re compiling and calculating data yourself, and it’s a disaster.”

Yaarz set out to build an all-in-one SaaS platform to manage merchandise catalogs, inventory, sales, and reporting, paired with a mobile app for users in the field to process payments, exchanges, and refunds on the go. The platform needed payment infrastructure that made it easy to onboard entertainment industry users, accept and monetize payments, and route funds and payouts.
Yaarz also wanted to help its customers sell more by giving fans faster ways to buy merchandise at busy venues, while enabling users to track online and in-person sales across events.

Yaarz needed to accomplish these goals while supporting an array of customers and situations. A major label could be managing multiple merchandise stands at a large venue, while a small, independent artist might not have the dedicated staff to run a merch table or the time to order a card reader. A venue, meanwhile, might be looking for a consistent way to sell merchandise across all of its events, particularly those with exclusive merchandise operator agreements. Yaarz needed flexible solutions for venues, artists, events, and countries without requiring its small development team to build and maintain separate payment systems.

Solution

In 2024, Yaarz built its financial infrastructure on Stripe, drawn to its developer-friendly technology, flexibility, and support for both online and in-person payments.

Yaarz implemented Stripe Connect to manage its multiparty payment flow and monetization model. With Connect, Yaarz processes merchandise sales from fans and routes those funds to the appropriate user, who receives an automatic payout within a few days after the event. Stripe-hosted onboarding in Connect makes it easy for users to join the platform, submit know-your-customer (KYC) information and begin accepting payments within 15 minutes. With Stripe APIs, transaction and payout information feeds directly into Yaarz’s reporting interface, giving each user a unified view of merchandise sales across every show.

Yaarz adopted Stripe Payments to power Click & Collect, its in-person, mobile commerce experience. Click & Collect enables fans to bypass long lines by scanning a QR code, purchasing merch from their phones, then picking it up at a designated location. Yaarz chose Stripe’s embedded payment element, a UI component for collecting payment details and displaying relevant payment methods for the Click & Collect checkout experience. Fans buying online can pay in currencies including euros, Swiss francs, US dollars, and British pounds sterling, and Yaarz can easily turn on new currencies to meet demand. To give customers a fast checkout experience, Yaarz accepts digital wallets Apple Pay and Google Pay. Users can also manage exchanges and refunds in Yaarz's mobile app with Payments handling the back end.

Yaarz adopted Tap to Pay on iPhone, enabling users to quickly get set up and start accepting contactless payments directly from their phones without dedicated hardware. Yaarz uses Tap to Pay on iPhone to power its Yaarzer sales force service, which supplies Yaarz-trained, local sales staff for customers’ merch stands. The sales staff can start selling from their phones right away—no card reader needed.“Tap to Pay is the plug-and-play, easy-to-go solution. Users can sign up today and sell tonight at their show very easily,” said Marin Mittet-Magnan, head of product and market development at Yaarz.

Yaarz also deployed Stripe Terminal to enable users to accept in-person payments at merchandise stands. Yaarz supports several Stripe card readers, including the Stripe Reader S700 for larger venues and the BBPOS WisePad 3 for smaller ones.

By integrating Connect, Payments, and Terminal, Yaarz feeds every transaction into one system, so users no longer have to piece together sales data from separate channels or shows to track their overall performance.

Results

Yaarz grows payments revenue 401% in one year with Connect

Yaarz has processed more than 570,000 orders across its platform since launch, serving users in Belgium and France, with plans to expand further across Europe and into the US. By monetizing online and in-person transactions in Connect, Yaarz grew payments revenue 401% from 2024 to 2025.

Yaarz implements Connect with only one developer in just a few weeks

A single developer, alongside Yaarz’s founders, built the entire Connect integration in just a few weeks during the company’s early days using Stripe’s developer-friendly documentation. Additional tweaks to Yaarz’s Stripe implementation are just as efficient.

“Stripe gives us the payment rails for every new country or payment method, so our developers spend their time on our product, not on payments infrastructure,” said Mittet-Magnan.

Yaarz grows payment volume 2.5x in one year with unified commerce experience

Yaarz increased in-person payment volume by 2.5x, from €3.08 million in 2024 to €7.76 million in 2025. Online merchandise sales kept pace, growing 120% through the Click & Collect mobile ordering experience. In combination, Yaarz offers fans more options to buy merch and gives users and their teams a unified view of merchandise sales to more quickly and reliably plan inventory for future events, expedite reporting, and make better strategic decisions.