Challenge

Refurbed has the highest customer satisfaction in its industry with a 4.8/5 on Trusted Shops. This success is largely attributed to the quality of the products sold through its marketplace. With $45 million in gross merchandising volume, Refurbed is experiencing extraordinary growth. To sustain its success, Refurbed needed a payments partner that could help attract and retain the best merchants and scale its sales volume without additional effort from its team.

Solution

Refurbed integrated Stripe Connect into its marketplace to onboard new merchants and sell to users across 9 markets in Europe. Stripe’s customisation capabilities also offered Refurbed a compelling way to deepen its relationships with its highest-performing merchants. For merchants who sell products with the best quality and service, Refurbed expedites their payout time. This extra incentive motivates sellers to maintain exceptional customer experiences, given how valuable working capital is to their success.

Results

Refurbed grew five times its size and onboarded three times more merchants in 2019. The company relied on Stripe to seamlessly manage payments and offer an exceptional merchant experience without requiring a significant time investment from Refurbed’s engineering team. Launching in Germany with Stripe also laid the foundation for Refurbed to expand into nine other countries, including Austria, Poland, Italy, and Spain. Given the continuity of using a single payments provider, Refurbed can maintain the same internal system to adapt to local requirements and payment preferences—factors which have been critical to increasing conversion rates in these new markets.

Minimizing Fraud with Custom Settings

Because Refurbed sells products that are ubiquitous and of high value, it is consistently a target of fraud. The platform leverages 3D Secure on all payments to reduce fraud, and with Stripe Radar, Refurbed detects and blocks fraud with machine learning. As fraud schemes become more sophisticated, the team also customises its Radar settings on an ongoing basis for greater accuracy and efficiency.

Peter Windischhofer, the founder of Refurbed, summarizes, “Thanks to Stripe Radar, we are able to react very quickly to fraud issues and find easy solutions that stop fraudulent transactions.”