Challenge

London Gatwick operates more than 40,000 on-airport parking spaces for passenger usage alongside its excellent rail connectivity and extensive local bus networks. As passengers often decide how they’re getting to London Gatwick late in their overall travel planning, the airport wanted to simplify online parking reservations and payments. However, Gatwick’s existing payment system was far from frictionless.

In 2020, the airport had adopted Salesforce Commerce Cloud to manage its B2C ecommerce operations, but it maintained a separate payment processor. That processor’s technology required frequent maintenance and generated several issues resulting in failed payments, disputes and chargebacks, and customer complaints.

The system also made it difficult to integrate mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, and it created a manual process effort for refunds. At the height of the issues, Gatwick’s finance team had to manually process 600 mobile wallet refunds in a single month.

“Our payment system was creating organisational headaches and additional work, but a lot of our concern was driven by the voice of the customer. They were telling us that they were struggling to pay at checkout,” said Andrew Williamson, senior digital performance manager for London Gatwick.

To resolve these challenges, the Gatwick team implemented Salesforce Payments in 2023, which reduced ongoing system maintenance and the burden of payment oversight, and established smooth mobile payments from day one.

Solution

Salesforce had a solution on hand with Salesforce Payments, a native payment processing system for Commerce Cloud that is built on Stripe’s platform. Salesforce Payments offered Gatwick as close to a ready-to-use payment processing system as it could get, with the additional long-term benefit of Stripe automatically managing ongoing software updates and maintenance.

“The evergreen nature of updates coming from Stripe through Salesforce Payments was really appealing to us,” said Williamson. “We’ve got better things to do with our time here. We want our development resources to be focused on building value-add features and genuine enhancements for the website.”

The Salesforce Payments implementation was managed by the airport’s external development support agency. Although the integration process itself was a light lift for the team, they spent extra time on QA testing to ensure that the platform delivered the stability and reliability they were seeking. Stripe’s professional services team partnered with Gatwick’s developers to provide additional guidance and expertise during implementation and QA testing, ensuring a timely launch.

Because Salesforce Payments uses Stripe’s payments infrastructure, Gatwick gained 99.999% uptime along with various authorisation optimisations. It also provided Stripe’s AI-powered fraud prevention solution, Stripe Radar, to automatically detect and block fraudulent transactions.

For payment methods, Gatwick uses Stripe to accept credit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. To further streamline the checkout process, Gatwick also chose to add Link, a digital wallet built by Stripe that autofills the user’s payment information to create a fast, easy, and secure checkout experience.

Results

Salesforce Payments integration completed in three months

Implementing Salesforce Payments was a light lift for Gatwick’s development team. The process was completed in three months, with the majority of that time spent on QA testing by Gatwick’s internal team and their development agency. Once the site went live on Salesforce Payments, the team saw instant performance improvements.

Hours saved each month for development and finance teams

The stable integration between Salesforce Payments and Commerce Cloud has eliminated the hours of work that development and finance team members used to spend each month addressing problems from the site’s faulty payment system.

Payment acceptance rate increased by 2.5 percentage points

A more stable payment integration, combined with the reliability of Stripe Payments and the advanced features of Radar, improved Gatwick’s payment performance on day one. Since implementing Salesforce Payments, Gatwick’s overall payment acceptance rate has increased by 2.5 percentage points, while dispute and chargeback rates are near zero, Williamson said.

33% of payments now come through wallets

Developing a working integration to Apple Pay and Google Pay and implementing Link has allowed Gatwick to offer a fast, reliable mobile checkout experience. Now, one-third of all payments are coming through those three wallet solutions.

The Gatwick team is planning to upgrade their Stripe implementation by replacing their legacy integration with the Payment Element, one of the embeddable UI components that are part of Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite. With the Payment Element, Gatwick is planning to add additional payment methods that customers can easily execute from their phones, such as bank transfers. The Payment Element will allow them to launch these methods much faster, all through a single integration.

Customer complaints have disappeared

For Williamson, one of the best results is the improvement in the customer experience. Before switching to Stripe, his team regularly heard from frustrated travellers who couldn’t complete an online reservation because of payment problems. In the two years since switching to Salesforce Payments, he hasn’t received a single complaint about online payments.

“We don’t have anywhere near the pain points on the site anymore. It’s as close to a frictionless payment experience as you can get,” said Williamson.

About Partner

Salesforce and Stripe have partnered to deliver a flexible, secure, and scalable payment solution, natively within the Salesforce platform. With Stripe’s AI-powered model for global payments embedded directly into Salesforce, enterprises can simplify checkout, automate revenue operations, and reduce time to value.